Reblog: Hundreds of Afghan Evacuees Are Cobbling Together New Lives in Vermont. But They Can’t Help Looking Homeward.

Above: Guilford resident Linda Hay and Sohaila Nabizada, an Afghan refugee. Photo: Kristopher Radder for Seven Days. 

On a sunny July day in Brattleboro, eight Afghans sat around a table in a converted pipe organ factory and talked about snow, sleet, ice and hurricanes. The refugees, who had arrived only weeks earlier, were learning English vocabulary words.

The class, held several days a week in Brattleboro’s Multicultural Community Center, included students who might never have rubbed elbows in their home country….

In the hallway outside, 27-year-old Sohaila Nabizada scrolled on her phone, dressed in a stylish red blouse, jewelry and white headscarf. Nabizada, an ethnic Tajik who is fluent in English, as well as Dari and Pashto, two of the most commonly spoken languages in her home country, worked for years in Afghanistan for the National Endowment for Democracy, an American nongovernmental organization. A former debate coach, she once taught Afghan women about civil liberties available to women in free societies. When Kabul fell to the Taliban, her activism put a target on her back. For weeks she hid from Taliban enforcers who repeatedly visited her home and interrogated her neighbors. Then she fled Afghanistan on her own.

“I knew it would be hard for me,” she said. “I took the risk to leave the country with an unclear future but with more hope. In Afghanistan, there was no hope.”

Read the full article at Seven Days: “Hundreds of Afghan Evacuees Are Cobbling Together New Lives in Vermont. But They Can’t Help Looking Homeward.”