Afghan Refugee Finds a New Home and Baseball

Meredith May writes for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Musadiq Bidar winds up for the pitch. Bases are loaded. No outs. The high schoolers on the visitors’ bench are bigger and have more swagger. They know Musadiq is new to pitching, and the stress shows on his face.

But if anyone can handle it, it’s the 17-year-old everyone calls Moose at Athenian School in Danville.

Seven years ago, when Musadiq worked 12-hour days making carpets in a dingy Pakistani factory, his biggest worry was whether he’d make enough money so his family could eat more than powdered milk for dinner.

Chased out of his native Afghanistan by the Taliban, Musadiq and his family fled in 1996 for a Pakistani refugee camp, where he later hooked knots into carpets in a cramped room shoulder to shoulder with 15 other children. As a 6-year-old, he made a carpet a month, earning the equivalent of $65 for his family. Not yet an adult, Musadiq has already lived through war, starvation and abject poverty, learned a new language and culture and come out the other side as an American teen on his way to college. His life thus far could fill a book, and he’s a natural storyteller, landing parts in school plays and reporting for the school paper. He’ll enroll at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., to study journalism after he graduates Thursday, with his sights set on international reporting. Clickhere for the full artilce.

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