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How do you keep your culture alive, when you’ve had to flee and create a whole new life in a country you never chose yourself?

Sarah Baharaki was born in Badakhshan Province and raised in Kabul, Afghanistan. But rather suddenly, the year she graduated from high school, the situation in her country took a radical turn. In just a few days after the fall of the capital city of Kabul, Sarah, just a teenager at the time, had to flee her home country with her family and has never been able to return home since.

In this conversation, Sarah walks us through being uprooted from her home country, landing in the UK, the culture shock she had to overcome, and how she balances her new culture with her home culture. When we speak of the differences in languages we also go into the topic of humor and ‘how to be funny in a foreign language’.

From a world away, she watched as her friends and classmates back home became stripped of basic human rights. Driven by a deep conviction, Sarah is a huge advocate for The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 4 which advocates for Quality Education, and SDG 5 which advocates for Gender Equality. Today Sarah takes charge of the topics dear to her heart. She has carved a path out for herself and is currently a Global Youth Ambassador for Their World, and a UK Youth Delegate to the UN Women in the UK. With a focus on Afghan women, she was also the Opening Keynote speaker at ECOSOC2024 at the UN Head Quarters in New York.

Episode mentions:
Afghanistan is not what traditional media portrays. Yes, security risks exist, but there is more to the country than just the Taliban’s unsettling presence. Learn more about Afghanistan and one of the most famous poets who comes from there in the following links:

• Omar Haidari — Human Rights Advocate and Blogger from Afghanistan
• The Afghan — learn more about Afghanistan through the eyes of an Afghan
• Yes Theory — 96 Hours Inside of Afghanistan in 2020
• About Rumi — Molana Jalal al-Din Mohammad-e Balkhi
• Rumi’s Poetry translated into English

In a wonderful twist of fate, this quote by Rumi (translated into English) feels incredibly fitting for this episode:

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

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✳ Sign-up to The QUEST. Newsletter to explore the crossroads of multiple belongings.

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Original music is composed and produced by Malik Elmessiry.
The inbetweenish pod is created and hosted by Beatriz Nour.

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Curious to learn more about the in-betweenish?
Visit our website: www.inbetweenish.net
Behind-the-scenes is on our Instagram: @inbetweenish.pod
Have an idea? Contact Us or send an email to inbetweenish.pod@gmail.com

Send us Fan Mail

Is cultural 'enoughness' a myth?

In this episode, I sit down with Lazou, a Sino-Mauritian-Canadian-American creative, podcasting colleague and friend who also explores questions of belonging. Lazou shares her unique perspective in understanding layered identities while sharing her own diverse cultural identity. Together we discuss:

• seeing the West through Disney colored glasses,
• language learning, translation gaps, and language evolution,
• colonization vs settling and the history of Diego Garcia,
• being Chinese enough, confronting biases and so much more!

Lazou is a talented musician, producer, and writer, hosting the 'Nuances: Our Asian Stories' podcast. Through her platform, she examines the Asian diaspora experience, tackling topics like queerness in pre-modern Asian times.

Episode Mentions:

• Podcast — Nuances: Our Asian Stories
• Podcast — Nuances Season 2: Queering Pre-Modern Asia
• Book — Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen
• Diego Garcia — Human Rights Watch: UK, US Expelled Islanders 50 Years Ago, a Crime Against Humanity
• Diego Garcia — AJ+ How the U.S. Stole This Paradise Island?

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✳ Leave a Review or Rate the show on Apple or Spotify. It means a lot!
✳ Sign-up to The QUEST. Newsletter to explore the crossroads of multiple belongings.

—

Original music is composed and produced by Malik Elmessiry.
The inbetweenish pod is created and hosted by Beatriz Nour.

—

Curious to learn more about the in-betweenish?
Visit our website: www.inbetweenish.net
Behind-the-scenes is on our Instagram: @inbetweenish.pod
Have an idea? Contact Us or send an email to inbetweenish.pod@gmail.com

Send us Fan Mail

Belonging vs Belongings:

It has always bothered me how similar these two words are, set apart only by an ‘S’. Yet somehow they hold completely different meanings.

In this minisode, I’m exploring the relationship between our sense of belonging and our physical belongings. The idea for this episode came about after I recently lost a physical product of mine and I found myself unreasonably upset over it. A conversation with a dear friend sparked this debate and now I’m letting you into bits and pieces of our conversations where she shares a metaphor that helped me reframe the relationship between belonging and belongings.

I hope you find value in this less structured, unscripted minisode and if you do, please share it with a friend or spark this conversation with someone around you:

What is the relationship between belonging and belongings?

Are belonging and belongings intricately connected?

Can we find belonging without our belongings?

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✳ Leave a Review or Rate the show on Apple or Spotify. It means a lot!
✳ Sign-up to The QUEST. Newsletter to explore the crossroads of multiple belongings.

—

Original music is composed and produced by Malik Elmessiry.
The inbetweenish pod is created and hosted by Beatriz Nour.

—

Curious to learn more about the in-betweenish?
Visit our website: www.inbetweenish.net
Behind-the-scenes is on our Instagram: @inbetweenish.pod
Have an idea? Contact Us or send an email to inbetweenish.pod@gmail.com