In a 2006 photo essay published in TIME, readers...

Afsar pictured in the April 17, 2006 issue of TIME magazine (Photo by Yuri Kozyrev)

Afsar outside of the TIME offices in New York City on Dec. 21, 2012. (Photo by Elizabeth Herman)

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In a 2006 photo essay published in TIME, readers caught a glimpse of Insha Afsar, a 7-year-old girl who lost a leg when her house collapsed on it during an earthquake in Kashmir. The stark photograph of a girl in a red coat struck a chord with TIME readers and staffers. In the Feb. 5, 2007 edition of TIME, managing editor Rick Stengel wrote about Asfar:

In April 2006, we ran a three-page photo essay by Yuri Kozyrev documenting the state of refugees in Kashmir after the catastrophic earthquake that took the lives of 75,000 people and displaced 3 million more. One of Yuri’s pictures was of a slight girl in a hooded orange parka who had lost her leg in the quake. Two days after the magazine appeared, TIME’s news-desk supervisor, Eileen Harkin, got a call from a member of the Shriners organization in Los Angeles. It wanted to help the girl. With clues from Yuri’s notebooks and the assistance of his contacts in several relief organizations, we located the girl, Insha Afsar, 7, in a camp in Kamsar, just north of Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. TIME news director Howard Chua-Eoan personally paid for her to travel to the U.S. with her father for treatment. The Shriners arranged for free medical care for her, while the Heal the Children Foundation found a family in Connecticut to put up Insha and her father. She has since been fitted with a special prosthesis, which will have to be adjusted as she grows.

Insha continues to learn and thrive. In a recent holiday visit to TIME’s offices in New York City, she told staffers about her love of skiing black diamond slopes and her wonder at the 3-D portions of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular show.