Najiba Ebrahimi lives in Freedom. It’s the São Paulo neighborhood where the 33-year-old has settled and what she feels she’s finally attained after escaping the Taliban, writes Jill Langlois. A champion for the rights of women and girls in the minority Hazara community, Ebrahimi taught biology at a girls’ school in Afghanistan’s southeastern Ghazni province and shared her love of sports with her students. That turned her into a target when the extremist group made its return. In late August, she began receiving phone calls from various men using different numbers. “They said, ‘You shouldn’t be alive. If you stay here, you’ll die,’” Ebrahimi says. So she fled. Her parents had left Afghanistan years earlier for Brazil because of ethnic persecution. She crossed the mountains of Pakistan with her teenage daughter, brother, and cousin, the women under the cover of burqas. Her parents got to work on getting them visas. Now Ebrahimi works in São Paulo with her family at their Afghan restaurant, Koh-I-Baba, named for the mountains of her ethnic Hazara homeland. It’s a new start and also a return to what she loves most: life with her family and the freedom to be herself. Read more about the Afghan women who are attempting to build new lives abroad at the link in our bio. Photographs by @luisadorr for TIME