Three Year Old Uyghur Girl Sings a Song About Her Parents - 2016

As her grandma naps, Paziliya* sings a song about her mother and father. The words are close to "My mother played with me, what did I tell my dad and what will I tell my mom." This is repeated until the end when she asks for an applause from the audience. When this was filmed, her father laughed every time we played her performance for the family and friends. Unfortunately, a year ago, this young girl and her sister lost their father as he was put behind the walls of a re-education camp in Xinjiang. I was told his crime was "praying at a mosque". The family doesn't know when, or if, he will ever be free and don't even know if he's still alive. The girl's mother told me in private that her greatest fear is that she herself will be taken and then her girls will have no one to care and protect them. *name has been changed to protect privacy (The woman in the pink hijab filming is me.)

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