Our Founder and CEO Taban has taken part in one of her most in-depth and moving interviews to date – which you can watch in full here.
The recent interview was for the How I Became podcast by Unify, and explores Taban’s traumatic past in Iraq, in which she survived genocide and was imprisoned with her family as a young child. It also sees her recount her later journey in setting up the Lotus Flower, and how she found her true purpose in life.
While you can listen to it on-the-go as an audio podcast on Spotify or Apple, you might prefer to see the full recording instead, as it’s certainly a deeply powerful and engaging watch.
As her story slowly unfolds, you’ll hear Taban recall the moment she was playing in the garden when Saddam Hussein’s police turned up and took her and her mother to prison, along with her grandparents. “All the adults were begging them not to take me because I was a four-year-old,” she remembers. “But they took us.”
She then looks back on their terrifying time in prison, as well as the realisation they were to be taken away in buses and buried alive in mass graves. “Part of that process is for you to see the diggers. You know you’re going to your death,” she tells podcast hosts Ashley Samuels-McKenzie and Charles Parkinson. “They’ll start shovelling sand over you, so it’s a very, very slow torturous death.”
Taban also covers the family’s remarkable escape and time spent in hiding in Iraq, as well as their eventual rescue by Amnesty International and move to the UK, where they arrived as refugees to start a new life.
The podcast then covers Taban’s return to her homeland during the ISIS conflict in 2014, and why she was unafraid to help with the aid effort – despite huge danger and risk in the region. “Things that are very extreme don’t scare me,” she says. “I think that’s because we were exposed to it at a very young age.”
Taban also opens up about surviving an abusive marriage, and turning her past pain into purpose to establish her life’s greatest passion – the Lotus Flower.
And finally, she reveals her hopes for the future, and what still lies ahead: “It’s been a very surreal journey and I feel like I’m only just beginning, because it’s the first time where I don’t feel like I’m in prison,” she says. “I actually feel like I can breathe now and get on with the work I need to do.”
Please do check out the whole interview below – we’re certain you won’t regret it!