A 26-year-old woman horrifically burned in an acid attack has spoken out about her trauma as she re-builds her life in Houston, Texas.
According to a report in Daily Mail, Julie Aftab was 16 and working in an office in Pakistan when a man walked in and asked her if she was Christian, spotting a small cross she wore around her neck.
She replied that yes, she was and the man became abusive, shouting at her that she was living in the gutter and would go to hell for shunning Islam.
He left and returned half an hour later, clutching a bottle of battery acid which he savagely chucked over her head. As she ran screaming for the door a second man grabbed her by the hair and forced more of the liquid down her throat, searing her esophagus.
Teeth fell from her mouth as she desperately called for help, stumbling down the street.
A woman heard her cries and took her to her home, pouring water over her head and taking her to hospital.
At first the doctors refused to treat her, because she was a Christian. “They all turned against me,” she told the Houston Chronicle.
“Even the people who took me to the hospital. They told the doctor they were going to set the hospital on fire if they treated me.”
Eventually Julie’s family found a hospital that agreed to take her in but there was little they could do.
Julie could not speak or move her arms and the acid had burned through her skin to leave bone-deep wounds.
67 percent of her esophagus was burned and she was missing an eye and both eyelids. What remained of her teeth could be seen through a gaping hole where her cheek had been. The doctors predicted she would die any day.
Despite the odds she pulled through. She remained in hospital for a year, unable to speak or see for the first three and a half months.
On leaving the hospital she was labelled a pariah in her neighbourhood, her family was persecuted and their home was burnt down.
“They wanted to hang me,” she told the paper.
But there was light at the end of the tunnel for Julie. A nondenominational bishop arranged for her to be treated in Houston and to live with a local couple, Lee and Gloria Ervin, whom she now calls Uncle Lee and Auntie Gloria.
Supported by her host parents a now 26-year-old Julie says the attack has made her faith stronger than ever.
“Those people, they think they did a bad thing to me, but they brought me closer to God,” Julie told the paper. “They helped me fulfill my dreams. I never imagined I could be the person I am today.”
Julie has had 31 surgeries to reconstruct her face and has gone on to accomplish things no member of her family had done, including graduating from high school and going to college.
She spoke no English when she arrived in Houston in 2004 but will later this month take her citizenship test, having been granted asylum in 2007. Julie is an accounting major at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.