My name is Hamid Allah Mohammadi. I was born in 1999 in Tehran, Iran, into an Afghan family of sculptors. From a very young age, art become an important part of my life. When I was six years old, I became fascinated by my father’s drawing books and began copying and creating my own sketches. By the age of nine, during my summer holidays, I had started learning stone sculpture in my family’s (father and his brothers) stone workshop in Tehran.

In 2005, my uncle Abbas moved back to Afghanistan and established a stone factory in Kabul. In the spring of 2010, when I was ten years old, my father decided that our family should also return to Afghanistan so that we could join his brother.

We lived in Kabul for approximately three years. During that time, however, the situation in Afghanistan gradually became worse. Our family’s stone factory was accused of desecrating Islamic beliefs and was attacked several times by local Islamist groups. These attacks created an increasingly dangerous situation for our family. In the spring of 2013, when I was thirteen, my family made the difficult decision to leave Afghanistan and return to Iran.

When we returned to Iran, I faced a different set of difficulties. My family did not have valid residency documents, and because I was an undocumented Afghan resident, I could not continue my education in the regular Iranian school system. Instead, my father enrolled me in private English classes and also some of the major school subjects at an informal Afghan school. While working at the family’s stone workshop I could attend to these classes at the evenings.

Being Afghan in Iran already meant facing discrimination from both society and the authorities. Being undocumented made our situation far more difficult. My family lived with the constant fear of arrest and deportation to Afghanistan. Police checks were common on buses and in different parts of the cities year-round. At different times of the year, police would also enter factories without previous informs into workplaces searching for undocumented Afghans. This uncertainty affected every part of our daily lives.

In 2015, I was still an undocumented Afghan without proper travel documents, which meant that I had no possibilities to travel legally to another country. My father was deeply concerned about our safety and our future. He therefore decided to try to get our family to a place where we could live more safely and have a better future: Europe.

Because of the circumstances and the many difficulties involved in travelling to Europe, however, I was ultimately the only member of my family who was able to make the journey all the way to Europe.