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 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Going to School”
Chapter 4 recounts Ahmedi’s introduction to formal schooling. When she was six years old, she started school in Kabul. She notes the humble conditions of her school in contrast to American schools, but for Ahmedi, school was a wonderful place. For the first six years of her life, her social world consisted largely of family, but entering school opened up a new world of relationships and peer dynamics. Although school was occasionally interrupted by the war—school was canceled when it was a “bad rocket day”—Ahmedi’s memories of this time are dominated by her fondness for her teacher. Her teacher told the children stories that weaved the personal with the cultural and natural worlds.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Shortcut”
Chapter 5 deals with the fateful day that Ahmedi stepped on the hidden landmine and suffered the injuries that would shape her life for years to come. One morning, she woke up late for school. She hurried to get dressed and gather her school things and ran out the door. She noticed that there were no other school children making their way down the road—that is how late I must be, they are all already at school, she thought. She got the idea to take a shortcut across an overgrown field. Suddenly, a fire flashed at her feet, the earth seemed to move, soil showered down on her, and then she went blank. Ahmedi woke up on the ground surrounded by a crowd looking at her with horrified faces. Eventually, her family came, and she was taken to the hospital.
At the hospital, the Afghan doctors did their best to bandage her wounds, but there was little else that they could do. Ahmedi was mostly in shock the whole time, and she refused to try to look down at her legs. The horrified look on her mother’s face, and her anguished crying over her daughter’s injuries, told Ahmedi that it must be awful. The Afghan doctor told her family that a German organization came to Kabul to airlift a select number of wounded Afghan children to Germany for treatment. The doctor was simply trying to keep Ahmedi alive and relatively comfortable until the Germans returned. When Ahmedi learned she was to be taken to Germany for treatment, and that she must travel alone without her family, she got scared. The Afghan doctor reassured her, telling her that the Germans would fix her up just like new, and she would return to Afghanistan in high-heeled shoes.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
The wonderment of school opens up the side of Ahmedi’s personality that would carry her through the travails of the next few years. The reader learns of her inquisitive, open mind and of her interest in a world beyond Afghanistan. The title of the book, The Other Side of the Sky, comes from this chapter. She explains that she used to gaze up at the sky and wonder what was on the other side. Then, she went to school, and her teacher informed her that the sky was not a thing that you could reach and teach and pass through to the other side. “The idea of such a universe,” Ahmedi writes, “swept me away with its majesty” (41).
Similarly, the chapter that recounts her accident with the landmine also frames key personality traits that would come to serve Ahmedi well in the coming years of her transition to the US Through the horror of the accident, her perseverance, fortitude, and capacity to find the light at the end of a dark tunnel come into view.
This section also introduces the high-heeled shoes, which will become a symbol of normalcy and femininity for Ahmedi. She dreams that she will fully recover and will be able to walk again, though her time in Germany doesn’t quite live up to her expectations.
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