in afghanistan as a child, made it to the uk and is now a doctor running his own medical charity. his is an extraordinary story. what should we all take from it? waheed arian, welcome to hardtalk. thank you very much, stephen, for inviting me and for having me here. it s a real pleasure to have you on the show. ijust wonder, how much distance do you feel today as a distinguished doctor in the united kingdom? how much distance do you feel from your childhood and from your homeland, afghanistan? my family is still in afghanistan. my father, my sisters, five, six sisters are in afghanistan. one sister is newly displaced to sweden and two brothers are displaced as refugees to the united states. so i am all over the world when it comes to my heart, when it comes to my story, it s not finished that i m here in the uk. i m very proud to be an afghan british citizen both, and i ve got my cultural heritage from afghanistan and i m very proud of that as well. but on the other hand, it
until 2017 when we set up the charity there and then i didn t have to go because the charity is connecting doctors through mobile phones to smartphones. i m a humanitarian. i wasn t affiliated with a political organisation or the previous government. i would love to go back to help afghan people. we re still helping through our charity and i would love to see my own siblings. the charity you called it arian tele heal and we re going to talk much more about it. but before we do that, i do want to explore your experience because it s pretty extraordinary. and it seems to me you bottled up much of what happened to you as a kid for a long time after you left afghanistan, and then progressively over time, you began to open up about it, not least because you ultimately took the decision to write a memoir, in the wars, which i ve been reading. why did you bottle it up for so long? it is a trauma response, actually. trauma is an experience