From Kabul to Carnegie Hall: How an orchestra defied the Taliban to carry on playing
An orchestra from Afghanistan which defied the Taliban recently played at New York's Carnegie Hall.
BRAGA, Portugal — Collected from a family gravesite shortly before she left Kabul, the rocks and dirt in a tiny plastic container are among 15-year-old Farida Ahmadi’s most cherished possessions, a reminder of home.
Three years on and 4,000 miles away, in her new home in northern Portugal, it remains unclear if she will ever return to that sacred place in Afghanistan or see her family in the flesh again.
As a student at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM), Farida told NBC News, she feared at the time that Taliban fighters who had regained control of the country “were going to come and knock the door” and say, “You are arrested.”
“Notes of Protest: Afghanistan’s Orchestra in Exile” airs tonight at 10:30 p.m. ET on NBC News NOW.
“I didn’t think that one day I’d be studying in a country where the Taliban are going to come back,” she said in one of several interviews she gave this year. “I was thinking it’s not going to happen, the history that happened before.”
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