Well, for one reason or another, I instantly became attached to this story (I only learned of it and saw the pictures for the first time yesterday...I know, I'm slow/don't pay attention to the news much outside of the U.S. and the picture represents "old" news). I wanted to donate something to her and her family, maybe new clothes or money to purchase a new dress to replace her old, blood stained one (the article mentioned it was her "best dress"), so the hunt began. It took me a while, but I finally tracked down the contact information for the individual that took the photo and sent him an email. He is currently out of the country, so he sent me the contact info for his brother (who is a doctor and is still providing medical care to the family), and said to send any donations to him. So I fired off another email just a bit ago to his brother, to find out how exactly this would best occur, considering I am stateside, and not right down the street. It'll probably be tomorrow before I get a reply, considering there is a big time difference between there and here...but if I can help make a difference and help the girl heal from such a traumatizing experience (even if the help is only slight), totally worth the wait!
Here is the news article, followed by a link to the article and pictures (note: some pictures are graphic, afterall, the photo was taken where a bomb had just gone off very shortly before, but you'll never forget the look on her face if you do see it)
Down a rutted dirt alley in Old Kabul, the "Girl in the green dress" -- the subject of AFP's Pulitzer-winning photograph -- still has nightmares about the day a suicide bomber made her image world famous.
Tarana Akbari, 11, no longer wears her best dress, which was drenched in her own blood and that of her relatives who were among 70 people who died around her at a religious festival on December 6 last year.
AFP photographer Massoud Hossaini, 30, won the prestigious US journalism prize for his "heartbreaking image of a girl crying in fear after a suicide bomber's attack at a crowded shrine in Kabul," the Pulitzer committee said.
Tarana still cries sometimes when she remembers that day, but she managed an occasional shy smile in an interview with AFP at her modest home on Tuesday, as she cuddled her sisters, who were both wounded in the blast.
That her picture has been featured on newspaper front pages around the world means little to her, she says, with a small shrug and a fleeting smile.
But when she first saw the searing image she wondered: "How come I am alive. I can see all the dead bodies around me but only I survived."
She is still frightened at times, and that bloody day still haunts her, awake or asleep, but she says she is getting better.
One of the two spartan rooms that Tarana shares with her family of seven has a television in a corner, but what she sees there does not always help her recovery.
Last Sunday, squads of Taliban suicide bombers infiltrated the capital and unleashed gunfire and explosions in an 18-hour assault before all being killed by security forces.
"It made me frightened again," she said. "I am not happy, because that day when the bomb went off destroyed my family."
Of the bomber and those who sent him on his mission, she says only: "They did a bad thing. They should not have done it."
Her unemployed father, Ahmad, 35, lifts the shirt of Tarana's four-year-old sister to show horrific scars covering her entire stomach from the shrapnel that ripped through the celebrating crowd.
Out of 17 women and children from her extended family who went to a riverside shrine near her home that day to mark the Shiite holy day of Ashura, seven died, including her seven-year-old brother Shoaib.
Tarana herself has scars on her legs and arms and walks with a limp. She no longer attends school because her legs hurt, she says, adding: "I hope I can get well soon and go back to school."
Asked about her hopes for the future, the sweet smile makes an appearance and she says she would like to be a teacher, with the local language Dari being her favourite subject.
She spends her days playing with her sisters in the ramshackle house and in the dirt courtyard outside which leads to an alley where huddled young men openly inject heroin against crumbling mud walls.
Behind those walls, the "Girl in the green dress" nurses her pain and her fears, now dressed in a plain, baggy, shalwar khameez hiding the scars from the day her life was torn apart.
Link: http://news.yahoo.com/girl-pulitzer-win ... 43731.html
), and that he likes any people that likes to help his people. It is always refreshing to hear people supportive of Americans. Tarana wants to be a teacher, and prior to the invasion, she wouldn't of even had a chance to go to school, let alone dream of being a teacher. Dream big, little girl, dream big!
