Local man publishes memoir
Samadali Muradi, who's been running Rainbow News since 2014, says that it was encouragement from his friends and family (very much including his Polish wife Justyna and his son David) that prompted him to write Flying Towards A Secret Sky. The title is a line of verse written by revered 13th-century Sufi mystic and poet Rumi.The book chronicles the highs and lows of Samadali,s years-long struggle to leave behind the harsh hardships of his young life in Afghanistan. Born in 1969, he remembers that he was just 10 or 11 years old when he first had the idea of forging a future away from his troubled homeland.
Life in Afghanistan was brutally hard, especially so for six-year-old Samadali when his father died. That plunged his family, Samadali his seven siblings and his mother, into grinding poverty and forced Samadali to take a menial job while still an infant. And the background to his life was the war that the Mujahedeen were waging against the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan in an ultimately unsuccessful mission to prop up the country's communist government. But through the years he clung onto his dream of a better life.
"On Tuesday morning 13th June 1989 I left my motherland. My quest to rid my siblings and myself of poverty had begun," Samadali writes. At that point he could hardly have guessed the hardships and real danger that he would face over the years to come before he finally made it to Britain nearly six years later in 1994. This book ends with Samadali's arrival in England but he's already working on a second memoir recounting his years in Britain.
This story of a young man's determined effort to seek out a better life is absolutely riveting. The trials Samadali went through to achieve his goal included dangers and hardship most of us could hardly imagine. Read this book for a tale that exemplifies what sheer human determination, a little luck and an indomitable spirit can achieve.