#BringAyatHome

https://globalnews.ca/news/5731362/canadas-ban-adoptions-pakistan-family/

Ayat Ahmed is a healthy toddler, just two months shy of her second birthday and learning her ABC’s with her mother in a small Dubai apartment.

But it hasn’t always been this way. Born premature and battling pneumonia, she weighed only six and a half pounds at three months old when her Canadian adoptive parents, Tauseef Qureshi and Ameera Hanif, travelled to Pakistan to become her legal guardians.

Now, 18 months later, the couple is fighting to bring Ayat home, challenging a Canadian ban on adoptions from Pakistan, while also struggling against Qureshi’s recent cancer diagnosis.

“We stand a family divided on two separate continents, living apart, not knowing when we will have the chance to see each other,” Qureshi said from his south Ottawa home.

The past year has been marked by periods of extreme loneliness and desperation for the Ottawa couple, causing them to feel like collateral damage in an ongoing dispute between Canada and Pakistan that’s left officials from both countries arguing over the meaning of the word “adoption” and what it is to be a parent.