By Karen Lynn Williams, Khadra Mohammed
Two Afghan girls in a Pakistani refugee camp find one sandal each of a matching pair and decide to share, built from a real refugee girl's question about why no book had children like her in it.
In a refugee camp outside Peshawar, ten-year-old Lina digs a sandal out of a pile of donated clothes, and it fits perfectly. Then she spots another girl, Feroza, holding its match. Rather than fight over the pair, the two agree to share, a day each. They trade the sandals back and forth as the days pass, lining up for water, scrubbing clothes at the river, and scanning the lists posted on the wall for the names of families chosen to go to America.
It shows a refugee camp as a place where children still make friends, and it does it without pretending the hard parts away. The shared sandals give your child something concrete and generous to hold onto, so the setting never becomes too much. Underneath the friendship, the book is honest that both girls have lost family to war, and it treats them as whole people with jokes and routines rather than as objects of pity. For a child meeting the idea that other children live in camps and wait years for a safe home, this puts a real face on it, and it ends on the ache of a friendship split by the very thing everyone is hoping for.