ALBANY — It has been a long road to the University at Albany for Zainab Alfatlawi.
Though she graduated from Guilderland High School not far from the SUNY campus, her story begins in central Iraq where she lived until she was 3 and where her mother spent her entire life before emigrating to the United States in 2010.
Life in the aftermath of the American invasion of the country and the brutal sectarian violence that followed was difficult. It was all the more challenging because Alfatlawi’s mother, Entsar Alkhazrajy, has been blind since birth. Resources were simply nonexistent for a blind woman in the country. She stopped attending school after sixth grade and was never taught how to use a cane. She rarely left their family’s home in Hillah, a city on the Euphrates 60 miles south of Baghdad…