When Shah began working as a translator for U.S. forces at an Afghan airbase, in 2007, his parents warned that he was putting the family at risk. “In our culture, most kids listen to what their parents say,” he told me. “And they kept telling me to quit. They’d say, ‘You can have a piece of bread to eat and live a peaceful life. You don’t need chicken and rice.’ ” It had taken Shah two years to learn to speak English well enough to land a job with the Americans. His family was large and poor, and, although he was just nineteen, they depended on his earnings. He’d previously made a modest salary working as a part-time bookkeeper. A few years after he began working as a translator, Shah got married, and, in 2012, he and his wife had their first child. The whole family moved into a two-story house in a gated community. “I was proudly working,” he said. “I had something in my mind.”
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