I was 16 when my father died, and I had a choice to come back and live in his house or I'd stay at the school. But I felt if my father wanted me to go to that school when I was 5, there must have been a reason - and I understood that reason when I was a teenager, because that school became the only place where I was safe.

I was protected behind the walls of my house, the walls of the mosque and later, walls of my school. I didn't know that I was Palestinian. I knew that I was a girl, but the identity issues came later when I was 12 or 13 - then, they came in a very strong way.

As a woman, you don't have really much freedom of choice in the Middle East - very often, by the time they are 13 or 14, girls get married.

There's a deformity in the information that the public in the United Statesis receiving. It's contained in kind of a bubble and one day this bubble will explode.

My father was my mother's home, the one place that she knew she could be safe. It was all a journey of faith for him, and I think he felt like if you don't find more love and understanding at the end of a journey like that, then you are lost - and if you only find hate and resentment, it will destroy you. I believe that.

My whole childhood was about being in the garden. It wasn't really a religious place to me. The love I felt there... was in contradiction with what I saw in the streets. It was a different world.

You can come from China, Russia, any place, and you can be a New Yorker. You can say what you want to say here, really express yourself.