As college beckons, two young women trade chaos and sacrifice for a second chance

Hasti Shahdad, left, and Nicole Romero Recinos. CONTRIBUTED PHOTOS

By JADE D’AGOSTINO 

Right before taking the stage to receive diplomas, high school graduates feel whirlwinds of emotion — some dealing with waves of bittersweet nostalgia, while others are excited for the big party they’ll be at in a few hours. 

Hasti Shahdad, however, only thought of her childhood friends back home in Kabul, Afghanistan.  

“We started the same year, we were going through the same things and they are still stuck in time,” said the John Jay High School 2026 graduate. “They still can’t continue their education, and here I am, finished with high school, going into college.” 

In August 2021, just before her 13th birthday, the Taliban seized control of Kabul, realizing Shahdad’s worst childhood fear: “a day where Afghanistan’s government and everything that was going on would collapse.”

When news of the takeover reached her family, chaos erupted immediately. “We couldn’t even think of where to go,” Shahdad said. “All we did was, we just ran, we just ran for our lives.”

After hiding in basements for two months, Shahdad and her parents escaped to Qatar on a flight arranged by U.S. colleagues. Unlike her previous trips abroad, this departure was driven purely by fear. “It was the one time that I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said. 

For Nicole Romero Recinos, leaving home was also something that felt abrupt, given just one week to pack her things and say goodbye to life as she knew it in her small town of Cacahuatepeque, Guatemala. 

The parents of the Fox Lane High School 2026 graduate made the tough choice to send Recinos and her sister to live with their aunt and uncle in Bedford just before she started ninth grade at age 14. 

“They wanted us to have a different kind of education,” Recinos said, when talking about her parents’ decision — “a better one.”  

Although Recinos was born and raised in Chester, New Jersey, before moving to Guatemala at age 8, returning to the United States was still a difficult adjustment. This time, she was leaving behind her parents and 5-year-old brother. 

“I really didn’t want to be here because it was hard getting to adapt myself — different kind of country, different kind of people,” she said. “Once we started studying, I did have breakdowns … There were times where I felt I had nobody.” 

In 2016, her parents moved the family from New Jersey to Guatemala, where they were both born. Unable to return to the United States because of their immigration status, they built a new life there, opening a small pizzeria next to their home. 

Though separated by a two-hour time difference, Recinos said she and her parents call and video chat whenever possible, and she was able to visit them in 2024. 

Despite missing home, Recinos remained in Bedford as she worked toward the educational opportunity her parents had sent her there to pursue at Fox Lane High School. 

Thousands of miles away, Shahdad’s path forward began with her arrival in Qatar. 

Her family was placed on a military base where many Afghan refugees around them were grappling with anger, depression and the loss of their former lives. It was there that Shahdad’s passion for humanitarian work began to take shape, even amid what she described as an unsettling anger over her own forced displacement. 

“I focused that energy toward helping other people who felt a lot worse than I did,” Shahdad said, recalling the volunteer opportunities offered through the International Organization for Migration. 

Shahdad co-led multiple programs supporting Afghan refugees, including ESL courses, where she drew on what she had learned at her former private school in Kabul to teach English. 

After a little over two months in Qatar, Shahdad and her parents arrived in the U.S. in December 2021 and were placed at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. In February 2022, the family came to Goldens Bridge and Shahdad began eighth grade at John Jay Middle School. 

For Recinos, school became an important part of adjusting to life in New York, particularly through the teachers she met at Fox Lane High School. 

“Every teacher I had, they knew I wasn’t living with my parents, so I got emails from them, ‘Are you OK? Do you need anything?’” she said. 

In addition to her thoughtful teachers, Recinos said she found herself surrounded by students in similar situations, many of whom also had parents living in another country. 

“I never had a person or a group of people who were there to judge me. It was totally opposite, they really helped me. I could say I made a lot of friends,” Recinos said. 

Higher education is ahead for Recinos, who was accepted to all five schools she applied to before choosing the State University of New York College at Purchase, for its largest scholarship offer. She plans on studying education or going into veterinary medicine. 

Shahdad had a similar experience to Recinos in school, describing the encouraging atmosphere her peers and teachers created at John Jay. 

“

When you don’t know anybody, it’s those small moments where somebody calls for help or shares something that’s been going on with you that helps you feel like you belong to this community,” she said. 

Quickly immersing herself in life beyond the classroom, Shahdad began track and field and became her school’s first competing race walker in a decade, joined the feminism club and became president of the Latin club. 

“Every moment that I have freedom of ability to do something, I want to use it effectively and I want to make something out of it,” she said. 

In Afghanistan, her family spent decades doing nonprofit work centered on human rights and women’s empowerment, which they continue in New York through the Relief Committee for Destitute and All Refugee Families, focused on helping refugee families rebuild their lives. 

Outside of her school schedule, Shahdad worked part time at three customer service jobs to become more comfortable speaking English. She also worked with ArtsWestchester on its Afghan Arts & Culture Day, and helped her family’s small business, Glowy Roots, a natural health products e-commerce business. 

Shahdad begins her freshman year at the Macaulay Honors College in New York City next month, majoring in political science. Post college, she’s considering pursuing a master’s degree in international relations.

Fueled by the loss of women’s rights in Afghanistan, Shahdad dreams of one day working on the national or international stage to advance human and women’s rights. She credits much of this motivation to the perspective she gained after being forced to leave Afghanistan. 

“When everything can be taken away like that so quickly, you realize there’s no value or importance to what you’re doing if there are other people who are suffering, and so that kind of changes the perspective,” she said. 

A student at Penn State, Jade D’Agostino serves as a reporter for The Daily Collegian, where she specializes in investigative journalism.