U.S. Heals, but Homeland Calls a Young Afghan Burn Victim

Zubaida Hasan, 11, bounces across the playground at Round Meadow Elementary School in Calabasas with her best friend, Emily, a million miles from her nomadic family in Afghanistan. Before you see the scars, you notice her eyes. Big, black, brilliant eyes that tell you she was given up for dead but never doubted her own survival.

On the short ride home to Hidden Hills, a gated ranch community with a guard station, she’s a little too shy to do her usual sing-along with Freddie Mercury and Queen. She lip syncs, and a smile sneaks across her face.

“Now, I’m not scared of fire anymore,” she tells me when we get to the home of her guardians, Dr. Peter Grossman and his wife, Rebecca. “Just a little bit.”

Zubaida was horribly burned and disfigured two years ago in Afghanistan while pouring kerosene into a stove. Her father shuttled her across the border to Iran, where doctors told him there was little they could do. They said he should take her home to die.

But despite unspeakable pain, Zubaida had a fierce will to live -- a will that has humbled and awed those who have come to know her. Her injuries were so severe, her chin and upper arms became fused to her chest, and she resembled a hunched, melted wax figure.

“We see a lot of bad cases,” says Peter Grossman, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon whose father founded the Grossman Burn Center in Sherman Oaks. “But when I first saw her, even though they had e-mailed me photos, I was taken aback.”

In an odd turn of events, the terrorist attack on America and the subsequent U.S. occupation of Afghanistan helped save Zubaida’s life. The year after her accident in August 2001, her father, Muhammad, went to a U.S. Army base in Kabul and pleaded for help.

Capt. Michael Smith, an Army doctor, called the U.S. State Department and was put in touch with Michael Gray, a humanitarian relief coordinator. Gray called his brother-in-law, Peter Grossman.

With help from the Children’s Burn Foundation and a sponsoring agency called Interaction, Zubaida arrived in California last June with her father and Smith. Zubaida, a frightened and emaciated child in a strange land, spoke only Farsi.

“Even in that condition,” Peter Grossman says, “she stuck her hand up and said, ‘Hello.’ ”

Zubaida’s father stayed to see her through the first and riskiest surgery. Dr. Grossman and his father, Dr. Richard Grossman, assisted by doctors Matt Young, Alex Majidian and Charles Neal, cut through deep layers of scar tissue, freeing Zubaida’s face from her chest.

The scarred mask was gone, and a child’s face emerged.

Four days later, she was in surgery again. It was the second of 11 operations over the next year, with the 12th scheduled for this week. Skin grafts were removed from her back and placed over the open wounds on her face, neck, chest and arms.

And then, three days later, even as she fought tears from the pain of having the dressing changed, Zubaida’s father, a house painter, saw her smile.

After subsequent surgeries, nurses would find Zubaida out of bed, bandaged like a mummy and dancing around the room. Dr. Grossman had to start wrapping her bandages more loosely to allow for movement no one could control.

“She is unbelievably courageous, but she’s also the most stoic little girl,” Rebecca Grossman says of the way Zubaida has faced this ordeal while separated from family.

Not that she’s always been easy to handle. Last fall, Zubaida’s Afghan American hosts decided they couldn’t meet all her needs while caring for their own children. With no backup family in place, Dr. Grossman feared she might have to return to Afghanistan.

“I told my wife about it, and she said, ‘Why don’t we take her?’ ”

Zubaida moved in last November, and might be one of the few children in the world who celebrated Ramadan, Christmas and Hanukkah this past winter.

The Grossmans are trying to keep her in touch with Muslim culture -- she plays with Persian neighbor girls who speak Farsi. They’ve also introduced her to a Western lifestyle that most Americans, let alone Afghan nomad families, will never know.

Zubaida’s spacious bedroom, with its Barbies and posters of Iranian and American pop stars, might be the size of her entire Afghan home.

“My home is different,” she tells me, but balks at elaborating.

Out back is a mini-ranch with two horses, five dogs, a 100-pound turtle and a swimming pool. On a nearby ranch is the 1-year-old cross Andalusian horse Zubaida calls her own. Its name is Botox, because not all Dr. Grossman’s patients are burn victims.

Watching Zubaida feed a carrot to a horse, I marvel at how improbable a world this is, and how insanely imbalanced. A tragically maimed little girl is spirited from a ravaged and dangerous country, and lands in a gated Southern California community, tending to a horse named Botox.

The Grossmans, sensitive to every aspect of Zubaida’s recovery, worry about what it all means to her. They fret about letting her get too comfortable, and they worry that when she returns to an impoverished country where women have limited opportunities, her American experience could become a distant, painful memory.

But they must let her go, and soon. On the wall of Zubaida’s bedroom is a map of the world, with a bright red line looping from Los Angeles to Afghanistan. Next month, she travels that arc back home.

“I’ll miss my pony,” says Zubaida, who is good in math, getting better at English, and played the maracas last week in Round Meadow Elementary’s pride assembly. “I’ll miss Emily. Everything.”

But she misses her parents and eight brothers and sisters too, talking to them only occasionally by phone.

The Grossmans have pampered her, yes, but mostly they have just loved her. Zubaida calls her hosts Mommy and Daddy, but when I ask about that, Zubaida smiles and says:

“They’re not my real parents. They’re just my play parents.”

Unless she’s in trouble.

“Then she’ll tell me, ‘You’re not my Mommy!’ ” says Rebecca Grossman. “And I tell her, ‘I know I’m not. But right now you’re living in my house, and you’re going to do as I say.’ ”

Whatever Zubaida’s stubborn streak comes from -- anger, pain, uncertainty or having experienced life’s wrenchingly implausible extremes -- Dr. Grossman believes it might be the thing that has kept her alive.

“She lost complete control of everything, from where she lives to how she looks, and this is the way she finally says, ‘OK, I’m taking charge of my life now.’ I can’t believe how really strong and brave she is about surgeries that scare her.”

Dr. Grossman hopes Zubaida can return to Los Angeles periodically for follow-up treatment. She’ll always be scarred, he says, but he can help her even more.

“The thing that’s important to me,” he says, “is how many people did something for this little girl.”

He names the U.S. military, the State Department, the Red Cross, the Children’s Burn Foundation (which is paying most of the medical bills), Sherman Oaks Hospital, the Grossman Burn Center, the Afghan American community, the Iranian American community and Round Meadow Elementary students and faculty.

“I’m not much of a flag-waver, but I’m proud to be a part of that -- all these people in America coming together to try and give Zubaida her childhood back.”

Maybe she’ll be a doctor when she grows up, Zubaida tells me, those brilliant eyes shining. Maybe she’ll be able to return to America to study, and then go back home to help take care of sick children the way Dr. Grossman took care of her.

If the “before” photos of Zubaida’s ordeal are almost indescribable, so are the “after” pictures. Zubaida dressed for a school dance. Zubaida holding a puppy.

In my favorite, she’s running on the beach in Malibu with a gorgeous smile and one arm swinging free. Zubaida is softened by dying light, purple sea at her back. A child finally at play.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.