5 years ago: All She Wants to Do Is Dance

That initial description of Abbas in her leopard-print tops and oversized jewelry reminded me of several larger-than-life women I have known — people of whom I’m enormously fond for their love of life and their cheerfully boisterous insistence that the world deal with them on their own terms. But as courageous in their own way as those women are, none of them lives in a place like Baghdad. None of them drove a van full of schoolchildren every day while living under Saddam’s dictatorship and then kept driving through the chaos of invasion, of a bungled occupation and civil war.

Azhar Abbas is awesome.