In her memoir, A Good Wife. Escaping the Life I Never Chose, Samra Zafar explores the roots of her abusive arranged marriage and her courageous breakaway from the confinement imposed on her. Samra Zafar, a woman of Pakistani Muslim origin, was just sixteen when her parents agreed to marry her to a twenty-seven-year-old stranger halfway around the world in Canada. Her husband to be and his family vowed that the marriage and the move would include the fulfillment of her dream of a university education. At the age of seventeen, she was a new immigrant, married and living in Mississauga. A year later, she was pregnant and residing under the same roof as her in-laws who insisted that their needs and wishes took precedence over Samra’s personal goals. Samra couldn’t leave the house, earn her own money, or pursue her dream of attending university. As their home slowly became a prison, Samra realized that the initial assurances that her husband and his family had given to lure her to Canada were false.

In the years that followed Samra suffered from her husband’s emotional and physical abuse that left her feeling isolated, humiliated and betrayed. Meanwhile, her husband grew alternately distant and violent as Samra increasingly fell under her in-laws’ domination. The arrival of a second daughter only deepened Samra’s sense of entrapment. In her memoir, she recalls the insidious trajectory of her marriage in which she would resolve to leave but was repeatedly enticed to return by her husband’s empty promises and her fear of being a divorced, single parent in the Muslim community.

Desperate to get out, she devised an escape plan for herself and her two daughters. When the family found themselves in dire financial straits, Samra was allowed to get a job, learn to drive and start a home daycare business. She squirreled away money and applied successfully for admission to the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Because she could pay her own way, there was nothing that her husband and his family could do to stop her.

After a decade of abusive living, Samra pursued her education as a single mother working multiple jobs. She completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Economics from the University of Toronto with the highest distinction. She was named the top student in Economics and was the recipient of the prestigious John H. Moss Scholarship given to the single most outstanding student across the university’s three campuses. Today she is one of the youngest alumni serving as a Governor for the University of Toronto. Her TEDx talk was named one of twelve epic talks on gender-based violence.

How did Samra Zafar soar to such heights? Her strength, resilience and exceptionality are clearly the most cogent explanation. But what role did host institutions, particularly the university, play in removing barriers to her success? In her memoir, Samra provides a number of seemingly ordinary, but impactful examples.

At the outset, an academic counsellor in the university’s registration office bypassed the lengthy waitlist for two required courses, thereby allowing Samra to begin in the Bachelor of Business Administration program while running her daycare centre at home.

A counsellor at the university health centre assured Samra that her husband’s controlling, belittling behaviour was not her fault. “You are being abused,” the counsellor said. Samra writes: “Abuse. Until the counsellor gave me that word, it was not part of my vocabulary. No one I knew ever used it, in English or in Urdu.” With a name for the pain she was enduring, as well as charts on “The Cycle of Abuse” and “The Power and Control Wheel,” Samra felt bold enough to fight back.

Later, when she was ready to leave her marriage, the university’s student housing services found her an apartment on campus without delay. The Students’ Union on campus encouraged her to attend council meetings and provided babysitting for her daughters. “You don’t have to go through all of this alone. We’ll help you,” the student leaders said. An economics professor championed her stellar academic achievements.

A Good Wife makes a major contribution to the literature on immigrant women in Canada. Samra Zafar’s inspirational memoir illuminates her personal story of abuse and reminds us that those in positions of relative power can help to change the lives of the powerless.

A recent headline on the front page of The New York Times cried: “An Ebola Orphan’s Plea: Do You Want Me?” (December 14, 2014) The heart-rending plea came from Sweetie Sweetie, a four-year-old girl in Sierra Leone who witnessed her whole family succumbing to the deadly Ebola virus afflicting a number of countries in West Africa.

The impact of Ebola has been particularly severe on children, the NYT reported. More than 3,500 children have been infected and at least 1,200 have died. The worst off, by far, are the Ebola orphans. The United Nations Children’s Fund says that across the region there may be 10,000 Ebola orphans. Many are stigmatized and shunned by their own communities. “If there’s an earthquake or a war, and you lose a mother or a father, an aunt will take care of you,” said the head of UNICEF’s office in Sierra Leone. “But this is different. These children aren’t being taken in by extended family. This isn’t like the AIDS orphans.” People in hard-hit Ebola areas consider children to be mini time bombs. So far, the orphaned Sweetie Sweetie has not shown symptoms of the Ebola virus. Still no relatives have sent out a search party to find her.

Does it matter whether the precipitating event is war, ethnic strife, civil unrest, natural calamity, poverty or disease? The most vulnerable, whatever the circumstance, appear to be children who are often orphaned in the wake of these devastating events. Well, obviously. Whether we call them Ebola orphans, AIDs orphans or in the case of the British Empire, Raj orphans, the fact is self-evident: orphans are always with us. The enduring and haunting appeal of their stories perhaps explains the immense success of Old Filth (2004), a riveting portrayal of a Raj orphan written by the prolific English novelist Jane Gardam.

North American audiences are probably unfamiliar with the term “Raj orphans.” They were young children born in the warm colonies of the British Empire — India, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong — and sent back to the damp and chilly mother country to be raised either by relatives or strangers in foster homes. Their fathers were mostly senior personnel in the army, civil service, the church or higher levels of trade. Why would parents take such drastic measures? Fear that their children would die of tropical diseases was the official reason. Less frequently stated was the intention to Anglicize their offspring from an early age, thereby securing the next generation of loyal servants to the Empire.

Rudyard Kipling, as avid readers of colonial fiction may know, suffered woefully when, at age six, he was sent to England from his birthplace in Bombay, India. His experience as a Raj orphan, described in his story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” is the inspiration for Gardam’s novel, Old Filth. “I wanted to show what it does to a child — and how it shapes the grown-up that he or she becomes,” Gardam said in an interview. Edward Feathers, the protagonist in Old Filth is Kipling updated. Like Kipling, the fictional Edward Feathers was sent as a child from a British colony to England where he was beaten and bullied in foster care. And like Kipling, Edward Feathers becomes a driven, ambitious, yet emotionally stunted man. In the novel, Edward Feathers develops into a distinguished advocate and judge in Hong Kong. Indeed, his nickname “Filth” cleverly reflects his career trajectory. “Filth” is an acronym for Failed in London Try Hong Kong. His marriage, however, is a great deal less successful and sterile.

Gardam no doubt accepts the view that our childhoods mould us into the adults we become. Few would argue with that. In Old Filth, she focuses on the particular burden of the orphan who cannot escape the shadow of his or her ill-starred origins. Yet the charm of this novel rests in the energy and unexpected comedy Gardam infuses into the life of Edward Feathers, suggesting that there may be a silver lining to the orphan scenario after all.

That silver lining, albeit hidden under a cloud most of the time, may be the ray of hope sustaining orphans in such different eras and locales. To be sure, the stigmatized child, Sweetie Sweetie profiled in the NYT, lives in an impoverished group home with other Ebola orphans in Sierra Leone. But a reporter was able to locate a young healthcare worker who treated her mother and wants to adopt her. When the healthcare worker was found at a rundown teachers’ college in Port Loko, Sierra Leone and asked if he remembered a girl called Sweetie Sweetie, he said without hesitation: “She’s mine.”