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Barcelona, Nov 16 (EFE).- Nadia was just 8 years old when an explosion left her face disfigured, and only 10 when she assumed the identity of her dead brother so she could work and support her family living in a slum on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Now, after 11 years of hiding her face, Nadia is in this northwestern Spanish city to undergo cosmetic surgery that will let her recover her feminine features without anyone back home being able to recognize her and possibly punish her for her "audacity" in passing for a male.
On Wednesday, two days after arriving in Spain, Nadia spoke with reporters to give her testimony on the topic of "Gender violence in Afghanistan, five years after the fall of the Taliban."
The event was organized by the Barcelona-based Association for Human Rights in Afghanistan, or ASDHA, which also arranged to bring Nadia here for her operation.
"I know that when I return to my country, as a woman, I won't have as many rights as if I were a man, but I'm a girl and I want to wear girls' clothing. It's what I have to do. I don't want to keep going around as a man because I'm not one," she said, dressed in a loose-fitting black leather jacket and a scarf on her head that covered part of her face.
ASDHA, with the cooperation of the Mundi plastic surgeons foundation and Barcelona's Hospital Clinic, will make her wishes a reality by sponsoring a series of cosmetic operations that will remove the disfigurement left by the bomb blast.
Nadia believes that if she can return to her country with her original features nobody will be able to identify her as the boy and young man whom she has publicly been for the last decade, and thus she will be able to avoid possible reprisals.
She recalled a time a few years before the arrival of the Taliban, when she and her family lived a "peaceful life," and she said that she was tired of being a man and hiding her true identity, with all the risks that implies.
"Every time I went to buy clothes, I took a big risk," she said.
If everything goes as the doctors hope, Nadia - with a new and somewhat prematurely aged countenance - will be able to rejoin her family in Afghanistan within five months and begin a new life with the help of the women's support organization in Kabul for whom she has worked for a while.
The head of the hospital's plastic surgery department, Josep Maria Serra, explained the details of the operations, in which surgeons will try to reconstruct her scalp to provide her with a full head of hair again and to rebuild one ear and regenerate the skin on a portion of her face.
Serra said that very advanced plastic surgery techniques will be used on Nadia.
After the fall of the Taliban regime, ASDHA paid for English language and computer classes for Nadia and took on the expenses of her family so that she could stop working and study. Her studies eventually allowed her to work for an NGO that helps Afghan women and to study economics at the university.
Television news teams and photographers have only been authorized to videotape or snap pictures of Nadia from the back and under no circumstances to show her face.
"She's risking her life, while for us it's just another news story," said the president of ASDHA, Monica Bernabe.
Nearly 700 Spanish troops are serving with the NATO-led security force in Afghanistan. EFE
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