97 pages • 3 hours read
Farah Ahmedi, Tamim AnsaryThe Other Side of the Sky
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Alone in Germany”
Although she was heavily sedated on her trip to Germany, Ahmedi was awake enough upon arrival at the German hospital to notice how clean and modern it was. She spent much of the first part of her stay in the German hospital coming in and out of consciousness due to the pain medication. She tells how the hospital staff put her in a tub of warm water and let her slowly loosen and remove her bandages herself, as her pain permitted. This experience contrasted sharply with her time at the Afghan hospital, where every day she was wheeled into a separate room where the bandages that had become stuck to her wounds were yanked off and replaced. She spent almost a month and a half at that hospital, and this daily ritual was the most painful part.
In Germany, however, it became evident that the care she received in Afghanistan not only saved her life but enabled her to have the chance to walk again. Ultimately, the German doctors had to amputate one leg and remove the knee joint of the other leg due to infection of the bone from dirt and blood. They fused the thighbone to the shinbone of her right leg. When she was finally able to look down and see her amputated leg, however, she was traumatized all over again. She spent many hours crying quietly to herself—she was all alone until a German mother of another child in the ward befriended her. The companionship and affection that this mother showed Ahmedi, along with the expert medical care, enabled Ahmedi to find the strength to begin her rehabilitation and return home to Afghanistan.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Back Home?”
Ahmedi spent a year and a half in Germany. She had departed Afghanistan in a haze of medicated pain, a scared little girl. She returned home cognizant of how she had grown through her experiences. She became anxious, however, as her plane approached its landing in Kabul, and she looked out of the window and saw none of the efficient modern highways snaking across the landscape or the patchwork of agricultural fields that she saw in Germany. She only saw barren wilderness, an emptiness that began to alarm her.
Her family smothered her in love and affection when she arrived, but Ahmedi was already learning that she felt separate from her old life. A part of her was still in Germany. Practically speaking, she discovered that she did not speak Farsi very well anymore, and other aspects of her life in Afghanistan felt confining and ill-fitting. The war had escalated during her time away in Germany, and Ahmedi had difficulty adjusting to the increased gunfire and rocket explosions that were part of her family’s normal life. She could not reconcile herself to the way of life in Afghanistan. She finally realized that holding herself apart from Afghanistan did not bring her any closer to Germany, and moreover, it also cut her off from the only source of warmth and nourishment in her life, her family. One day, she went to her father and told him that she was putting away her German clothes and would only dress as an Afghan girl again. She opened herself up to her family again and allowed their love back into her life.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
Chapters 6 and 7 begin a stretch of rapid change, emotional turbulence, and stark contextual contrasts in Ahmedi’s life that does not abate until after she is settled in the US. Ahmedi spent much of the two-chapter journey from the landmine in Afghanistan to the hospital and recovery in Germany, and back to a newly strange homeland, jostled by the differences between the two countries, between the before and the after, and between loneliness and belonging. She was grateful for the kind and resource-rich medical care she received in Germany, but compared it not to the lack of technology and resources in the Afghan hospital, but rather to the haughty and uncaring disposition of the Afghan staff.
As a child all alone in a foreign country, confined to a wounded body, and constrained by the language barrier, it is perhaps inevitable that Ahmedi somewhat conflated the economic and structural capacity of Germany with its culture, while doing the same thing in her mind in reverse regarding Afghanistan. In Germany, she discovered compassion from complete strangers, and found it difficult to connect with her family upon her return not because they were dispassionate but because of what was lacking in the larger surroundings—security, opportunity, and a modern Western aesthetic. Ultimately, in the most significant sign of her precocious maturity yet in The Other Side of the Sky, Ahmedi recognizes that she has it within herself to change her experience. Until she can change her larger context (leave Afghanistan), she can change how she is relating to her immediate surroundings and reintegrate back into Afghan culture, including most importantly, her own family. This self-awareness and the ability to adapt, rather than conform, will be put to the test in more severe ways once she is forced to abruptly leave home again in short order.
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