Forced To Grow Up At 12 - Maha's Stolen Childhood

Maha Jaffari was 11 when her father Ali, an Afghanistan army officer, was taken by the Taliban and killed. Her mum Zainab took her four kids to safety in Karachi, Pakistan. But within a few months, Zainab died, leaving Maha and her younger siblings destitute.

- Wendyl Nissen

We didn’t have any money for a doctor to treat my mother’s heart disease, so she died with us. That was the worst time because we needed to put her body in the ground and no-one would help us. We were strangers, no-one knew us and so we had to do it ourselves.

Then we had nowhere to live because we couldn’t pay the rent. I asked many people to give us a room, but no-one would because they didn’t know us. It was winter time and really hard.

In Pakistan, there is no support from the government for people like us. I went to the mosque and asked the Imam for help. He said we could stay at the mosque for two weeks, but then we had to sort ourselves out.

I needed work, so I asked around the neighbourhood for cleaning jobs. I ended up with three, which earned me about 3000 rupees a month, which is roughly $40 in New Zealand. I paid the rent with 2000 rupees and we had 1000 rupees for groceries, which wasn’t enough but we could survive.

By then, I was 12, my sister Aminia was 11, my brother Aris was nine and my youngest brother Aschar was six.