This story was originally published on October 7, 2015.

When U.S. news outlets run stories about women in Afghanistan, they often focus on how dangerous the country is. Fourteen years after America invaded — ostensibly, to liberate women and girls from the oppressive regime of the Taliban, which barred them from education, freedom of movement, and personal autonomy — women and girls still face many challenges. But that’s only one small part of the picture.

Shaharzad Akbar is dedicated to improving life in Afghanistan for everyone, and especially women. Akbar, 27, is currently the head of Open Society Afghanistan and is a co-founder of Afghanistan 1400, a group dedicated to bringing young Afghans into the political process.

Akbar’s family fled the country when the Taliban rose to power, returning not long after the 2001 invasion. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, she became the first Afghan woman to get a master’s degree at Oxford, in 2011.

Refinery29 sat down with Akbar at the Open Society offices in Manhattan to talk about her work, women in Afghanistan, and “global sisterhood.”

What’s a memory you have of growing up in Afghanistan that feels really special to you?

“When I was 10 or 11, we lived in a very old house in Mazar-e-Sharif in North Afghanistan, which had a very beautiful garden. I have memory of days and days of sitting in the garden and reading. My feet would be in the pool, and it was so quiet and so peaceful. I would read lots of literature.

“Another memory I have is from, again, in North Afghanistan. We lived in Sheberghan, and summer can get very intolerably hot. I remember that as the hottest hours passed and we were closer to the evening, my father and I would listen to classical music. Afghanistan has a very rich tradition of music, particularly traditional, folklore music. So we’d listen to folklore or classical music and we would read poetry.

“I think those evenings really taught me to be proud of my heritage, and to not look at Afghanistan and think we are poor and war-shattered and crazy, but to think we are a country that had an interesting past. We have a lot in our culture that we can be proud of, and we have a lot as a nation that brings us together, be it music, be it poetry, or literature.”

How did you get your education and end up studying in the U.S. and at Oxford?

"I was very, very fortunate to have parents to invest in my education at all times, regardless of what was happening in the country. We were migrants, we are at war, there are bullets flying outside. My parents say, ‘Education is a priority, you can never miss your homework, you can never miss your studies. You have to keep reading, you have to keep learning.’

“I think their vision made a huge difference in my life, definitely. But also a kind of luck, really — meeting the right people who were supportive, who saw something in me that I couldn't see in myself at that time…. I thought, ‘Studying in the U.S., I will definitely fail and not make it past the first semester. I have studied in Afghanistan; how can I compete with American students who have had years of preparation for their colleges?’ So mentors and people who believed in me and were like, ‘No, you can do it, just go and try.’”