After just six months, she can communicate in Slovenian with her classmates and has even been invited to take part in a school play,The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Shila has integrated very quickly into the Slovenian school system, even though it’s considerably different from the one in Iran. For instance, Iran has no music, shop, and homemaking classes; but it does have a class where traditional family roles are taught. “How a father must act, how a mother must act, and how a girl must act,” explains Shila in Slovenian.

She avoids eye contact with male classmates and teachers – in Iran, after all, boys and girls have separate schools. But everyone has gotten used to that and they don’t badger her, Shila’s teachers tell us. What we do notice, however, is how well her classmates have accepted her.

“I don’t think she is different from us. She reads well, paints very nicely, and is great with art, the Slovenian language, and math,” says Filip, one of her classmates.

She wats to become a tourist guide
Shila came to Europe with her family on a boat. She doesn’t like to remember the journey. She tells us that she spent much of the journey vomiting and sleeping, while her then-pregnant mother lost her child. They have been in Slovenia for six months; they are thrilled to be here and don’t want to go anywhere else. They live in former military barracks in Logatec – a family of five in a room with four beds and three cupboards.

Shila is happy that she will be able to go to college here; she would have had a hard time doing that in Iran. She wants to became a tourist guide. “I want to see other countries; how people live and what their languages sound like,” says the 12-year-old. “I hope that 2017 will turn out to be a good year with plenty of high spirits. I wish you happiness, health, and peace,” she says, addressing viewers of TV Slovenia.

T. H., Erika Pečnik Ladika; translated by J. B.