“I want to do crazy things I’ve never done before,” she said in an interview Monday evening, sitting in a classroom at a refugee center in downtown Toronto.
On just her third day in Canada, Alqunun, 18, seemed to be still a bit stunned.
In less than two weeks, she has gone from the cloistered life of a Saudi woman in Hail, a city in the northwestern part of the country, to the life of an independent woman on the other side of the world.
Now she can do things unimaginable for a woman at home.
“From the welcome I had and love I’ve been shown, I saw this is a country that respects human rights and the dignity of a person,” Alqunun said through an interpreter. “It’s also cold.”
(It was 30 degrees Fahrenheit in Toronto on Monday — 38 degrees colder than in Hail.)
Alqunun became a social media sensation, and a cause célèbre for the rights of women and refugees, after fleeing her family Jan. 5 while they were on holiday in Kuwait.
Freed from the restrictions on women’s movement back home in Saudi Arabia, and using a friend’s credit card, she bought a ticket for a flight to Australia with a layover in Bangkok — where Thai officials said they would send her back home.
Alqunun spent six nights holed up in a Bangkok airport hotel, opened a new Twitter account and mounted a campaign for asylum. “I’m afraid, my family WILL kill me,” she tweeted, adding later that her family had threatened to kill her before and considered her “as property or their slave.”
Furthering her danger, she renounced Islam on Twitter. “They will kill me because I fled and because I announced my atheism. They wanted me to pray and to wear a veil, and I didn’t want to.”
International outrage over the attempts to send her back to Saudi Arabia quickly mounted.
Although Alqunun had planned to fly on to Australia, the Canadian government granted her asylum. On Saturday morning, she arrived at the Toronto airport, where she was greeted by the Canadian foreign minister and a phalanx of reporters.
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