‘PROJECT BUILT ON DREAMS’
uOttawa student to help children in Afghanistan
Almost five years after arriving from Kandahar where her youthful ambition brought Taliban death threats, Roya Shams is turning her attention back to Afghanistan.
Shams, now 21 and a second-year student at the University of Ottawa, has reached out to friends and family in her homeland to build the foundations of a charity she hopes will soon improve the lives of Afghan street children.
She wants The Shams Foundation to give Afghanistan’s most impoverished children — both boys and girls — the kind of opportunity she has enjoyed here.
“This is a project built on dreams,” said Shams.
Street children in Kandahar, she said, often perform menial jobs just to make enough money to feed themselves and their families. She wants to open a centre that would both feed and educate about 40 children a year, and provide them with specific job skills, such as computer coding or carpentry.
“The war has put so much disaster in the lives of these children,” she said. “And these vulnerable individuals can be easy targets for terrorists, for the Taliban, because they need to belong to something.”
Shams, a full-time student, also works part-time at Export Development Canada and volunteers with the Forum for Young Canadians, among other organizations. Yet she has still found time to start putting together a charity she regards as the first step in a lifetime of helping other people.
Shams wants to launch the initiative next year, possibly under the umbrella of another charity, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. And while still working out legal details — she’s looking for professional help — Shams has already started to recruit partners in Kandahar.
“Life is still difficult there,” said Shams. “One day you think everything is fine, everything will be OK, and the next day there’s a Taliban attack. You never can say it’s stable.”
Shams arrived in Ottawa in January 2012, weeks after fleeing Kandahar with the help of former Toronto Star reporter Paul Watson and the newspaper’s editor, Michael Cooke.
Watson, one of the most highlyregarded war correspondents of his generation, cast aside his longheld belief that reporters don’t get involved in their stories to rescue Shams following the murder of her father, an Afghan police commander.
Watson had met Shams on assignment in October 2010 and had written about her galloping ambition: to finish high school, go to university and become an Afghan politician.
When Shams went into hiding after her father’s death — he had always protected her from violent reactionaries in Kandahar — Watson launched a quest to find her a safe school.
Ashbury College was the only private boarding school in Canada to offer a placement and bursary to Shams. In Ottawa, she had to overcome loneliness, culture shock and significant gaps in her education to succeed.
She graduated from Ashbury last spring and entered uOttawa with the assistance of the $20,000 Roger Guindon scholarship, which goes to students who have faced unique hardships. Shams is studying globalization and international development.
“I love the program, the learning process, but there’s always ups and downs,” she said.
She misses her family and frets constantly about her mother, who has heart issues. Shams has been unable to secure a visa for her to visit Canada.
She has her sights set on law school as a prelude to a career in politics or international development, and wants to return to Afghanistan whenever it’s safe enough. “My goal is helping humanity. If it’s through politics, charity work, law or teaching, I want to make change.”