by ButterflyEffect
Shaheen Shivji was happier in Kabul. There were bombs going off outside the compound where she worked for a development agency, but she preferred life in the Afghan capital to the one she had at home in Abbotsford, B.C., for one simple reason: She wasn’t lonely.“For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t feel isolated,” she says. “I felt socially connected, I was with like-minded people. I was doing something important to better the world.”