DREAMS THEY NEARLY LOST
The streets of Kabul were like a scene from a zombie movie. One young Afghan woman had never seen her city like this: deserted and eerily silent, not a soul daring to venture outside. Last August, the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan’s capital city, and this woman — who asked that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel refer to her only by her last name, Panahi — was carrying out a dangerous errand.
School representatives for a women’s university in Bangladesh had asked Panahi, a recent graduate, to retrieve nearly 150 students’ passports from a government office where they’d been sent for visa processing.
Documents were being systematically destroyed around the city, and school leaders knew the students likely would be trapped in Afghanistan without their passports.
The trip to the visa office was extraordinarily risky. Panahi believes if the Taliban caught her with stacks of passports belonging to educated young women planning to flee, she could have been killed.
But she also felt a huge sense of responsibility to
the students, and their futures.
“If I don’t take this chance, if I don’t do this right now, what if we (are) all stuck here?” she thought. “That’s even more dangerous, to stay here.”
The trip was successful. She hid the passports in her basement when she got home and later returned them to each student.
Panahi’s efforts allowed 148 women to begin what would become a days-long, harrowing escape from Afghanistan. They’d go from the gates of the Kabul airport to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, leaving their families behind.
The women since have been placed at universities around the U.S. Most have full-ride scholarships.
Panahi and eight other women are living with host families near the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, forging close bonds with one another as they confront the trauma of their journey and adjust to the shock of American culture.
As security conditions worsen in Afghanistan, the students are at once anxious for their families and driven to succeed in the U.S. They know how a degree and a paycheck could help everyone at home.
Still, a level of financial unease remains. UWM has said it can’t afford to offer the women full rides. Nearby Eastbrook Church is funding the students’ first semesters, but future scholarships are uncertain. Two English-language instructors who worked to bring the women to Milwaukee are crowdfunding their tuition.
The women remain resilient and focused on achieving the dreams they almost lost.
“The women in Afghanistan, we struggle a lot,” Panahi said. “So we are not going to give up. We will try very hard again and again.”
Evacuated students attended university designed to develop women leaders
Long before the women boarded a cargo plane out of Kabul, they were fighting for their futures.
Panahi’s family didn’t want her to go to school, and she’d often enroll a month after classes began, having spent the whole month trying to persuade them to let her attend another year.
Even as a child, she had to pay for her own tuition, she said. Half the day, she weaved carpets to earn money, and the other half, she would go to school.
“Education was the only way that I could empower myself, I could raise my voice, I could do things that I want,” Panahi said.
After a semester at an Afghan university, and then a year away to work and earn money for her family, she was accepted at a specialized Bangladesh school called the Asian University for Women.
The school — which the evacuated students attended — is designed to develop women leaders who will return to serve their communities. Many of its students are from poor or rural backgrounds and are the first in their families to attend college.
Entering airport took five days, more than 40 hours on buses
When the Taliban took over Kabul, the Asian University for Women arranged a flight for the women to Bangladesh. But the students’ evacuation hinged on getting past the crowds and checkpoints outside the airport gates.
Panahi and some other students became leaders of seven buses that aimed to take everyone inside. The group had to turn back twice, facing threats, gunfire and a bombing.
On the buses, the students were told to keep quiet, and not to use their cellphones in case the light drew attention from outside.
Although they were traveling at night, the students didn’t sleep a minute as they peered from the windows to make sure no one got too close. They worried someone could place bombs under the buses, a common terrorism tactic in Afghanistan, Panahi said.
The suicide attack outside Abbey Gate that killed 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghans occurred as the women were circling the airport on their second attempt. They were rattled but continued undeterred.
There was a chance the students would be killed if they got close to the gates, Panahi reasoned at the time. But if she stayed in Afghanistan, where women would be banned from the public sphere, she was certain her life would be over.
“That is, I think, death for me: When you are not able to do anything, and you cannot pursue your education, you cannot pursue your goals and your dreams. That’s exactly when you start dying,” Panahi said.
During the second attempt, after they’d tried to enter the airport for 30 hours straight, the women were forced to turn back. A Taliban member boarded one of the buses and told the girls to leave or he would kill them. Another bus sustained gunfire.
Khatera, a 20-year-old Afghan student in the UWM cohort, thought, “maybe this is the end, we will die.”
She read a prayer for dying people. But she hung onto a flicker of hope that she’d live.
It was as if someone was telling her, “You will get into the airport, and you will have a bright future,” she said.
On the third and final attempt, Panahi took her 19-year-old sister with her. She was worried that the Taliban would find out she was responsible for coordinating the evacuation and they’d retaliate against her sister.
After 10 more hours on the buses, the group passed the airport gates. Everyone was in — except Panahi’s sister and two other women, who were stopped at a Taliban checkpoint.
This was a gut-wrenching development for Panahi.
She thought of “how hard I really worked for this group of students to save them. Now it’s (for) my sister that I can do nothing,” Panahi said.
Once inside, Panahi told an American soldier that three women were left behind. She waited for three hours as he worked to bring them into the airport.
Panahi’s friends said, “Let’s go, and tell your sister to go home.” Panahi refused.
Finally, the women were allowed to enter. Panahi cried with relief. “I saved everyone,” she thought.
The ordeal, which spanned five days in total, remains a traumatic memory for the women. Every night for two months after the evacuation, Panahi had nightmares that she was back on the bus.
Khatera recalled the journey, and leaving her family behind, as “the hardest thing that I can ever imagine in my
life.” It’s also given her nightmares.
She regrets most that she didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to her siblings in person. She thinks of the phone call she had with her brother, just before she left, and how he cried.
Women became ‘family of sisters’ at Fort McCoy
When the women boarded the transport plane at last, they didn’t know where in the world they’d land. They had missed the initial flight to Bangladesh, and the U.S. military was tightlipped about the aircraft’s final destination.
Once at Fort McCoy, the students joined more than 12,000 other Afghan evacuees who were placed there temporarily while awaiting resettlement elsewhere in the U.S.
The most difficult part, Panahi said, was seeing everyone else with their families.
The women banded together and became a “family of sisters,” she said.
Stuck on the base with little to do and no clear timeline for leaving, many of the women became depressed. To combat the boredom and homesickness, Khatera and some other students began providing English classes for children and their mothers.
She also helped in the sewing center, teaching women how to use the machines.
“It was a tough situation,” Khatera said. “But I’m glad that I was useful for my people.”
Panahi got involved with the English school, too, and began volunteering in the donations warehouse and interpreting for people at the legal clinic on base.
Keeping busy, Panahi said, “was the only way that we could just keep ourselves a little bit happy.”
English instructors led effort to bring students to Milwaukee
Shortly after the women arrived at Fort McCoy, UWM English-language instructors Mari Chevako and Brooke Haley heard about their journey from another professor in Delaware.
They were eager to help.
“I couldn’t imagine being in a position to try and do something, and not do it,” said Haley, the director of the university’s English Language Academy.
UWM and nine other schools, including Arizona State, Brown and Cornell universities, would agree to enroll the students.
When UWM administrators said they couldn’t offer the students full rides, Chevako turned to Eastbrook Church, where she is a member. Church leaders agreed to fund the spring and summer semesters of the intensive English program.
Several Eastbrook families also agreed to host the women at their homes, not knowing if it would be a oneor five-year commitment, Haley said.
“They have just swept the students up into their families, like they’re their own kids,” Chevako said.
The students left Fort McCoy and arrived in Milwaukee just four days before Christmas. Haley and Chevako had planned a welcome celebration, but the omicron variant was surging.
So Haley cut up the big cake she’d made and dropped off pieces at each family’s home, meeting the women through masks and in the cold.
Host families provide support as women confront trauma of escape
Now, the eight students are finishing their first semester of the intensive English program, with goals to study medicine, economics, photography and more. Panahi, who finished her undergraduate degree in 2020, hopes to enroll in grad school.
Two sisters who initially settled in Utah with extended family will be joining the Milwaukee cohort this summer, bringing the total to 11 women.
After years working with international students, the two instructors know the realities of culture shock. But for the Afghan women, who didn’t know they’d end up in the U.S. when they boarded the plane out of Kabul, “you multiply that culture shock exponentially,” Chevako said.
Khatera, who hopes to study medicine, struggled initially with how to keep moving through her new life as she saw Afghanistan face increasingly dire hunger and security issues.
She has found key support in her host family.
“After leaving my country and my family, my host family was the first people in my life that really helped me to be the Khatera that was in Afghanistan,” she said: strong, courageous, passionate.
College graduate Panahi, who didn’t have the daily routine of attending classes, became withdrawn and sad in her first months in Milwaukee.
Panahi was nervous for her family and friends back home, and anxious that she couldn’t do much to help them. It’s still difficult to stomach: how she’s safe in the U.S. but almost everyone she’s ever known is in danger.
“I wish I could help others, too, and make a better life for them, too, but I’m not in a position to help them right now. And that is kind of a deep pain for me,” Panahi said.
Panahi’s host family has helped her find peace, she said. She told them she wanted to go swimming and play sports, and they enrolled her in a swim class and got her a membership at the UWM gym.
She said she missed speaking her language, and her host family connected her with a group of Iranians in Milwaukee who also speak Persian.
And in recent weeks, she started a job as an administrative coordinator at the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District.
With so much outside her control, earning money to send to her family was one choice she could make, she said. She does want to continue her education, but right now her family needs her financial support, Panahi said.
Panahi holds a degree in finance and accounting and would study the same in graduate school. She also hopes to build a career in the field, while doing what she can to support Afghan women.
“I just don’t want them to feel like this is the end of their life,” she said.
Goals to help women, ethnic minorities fuel studies
For Khatera, aspirations of helping marginalized Afghans, especially women and persecuted Hazaras, motivate her to continue her education in Milwaukee.
A member of the Hazara ethnic group herself, she now hopes to become a doctor and start a foundation for the poor. “Hazaras’ pain is my pain,” she said. Khatera feels a duty to serve her community. She wants to teach them about their rights and how to stand up for themselves. She believes many in Afghanistan could harness their talents and make the country successful if they were given the chance to succeed.
“The Afghan young generation just needs an opportunity,” she said.
She hopes to return to Afghanistan one day, but the current security situation makes it impossible. She also would love to bring her family to the U.S., but a number of logistical challenges prevent it right now.
Tuition is main worry for students
On a recent sunny weekend, the Afghan students got together to take a walk in Doctors Park, and the conversation turned to their uncertain futures, since only two of their semesters are funded.
Panahi listened as one of the women joked that if she couldn’t get a scholarship to continue her education, she’d become a truck driver.
“I felt very broken when I heard that,” Panahi said.
Panahi sternly told the girls not to think about it, and to focus on studying.
Haley and Chevako, the English-language instructors, are leading the fundraising effort to pay for tuition for the remainder of the intensive English program as well as four-year undergraduate degrees.
By September, the instructors need to raise $92,000, the cost of the 10 students’ fall tuition.
The students cannot apply for federal financial aid yet because they don’t have permanent residency status. Like most Afghan evacuees, they were brought to the U.S. last August under a provision called humanitarian parole that requires them to apply for asylum within a year. The asylum system is heavily backlogged.
The students are also looking for summer jobs to earn money to send home to their families.
Haley and Chevako have been heartened by the support the students have already received, from gift cards donated by fellow faculty to tuition discounts the university ended up offering.
And when they think of the Afghan women and their difficult journeys that led them to Milwaukee, they feel hope.
“I feel really inspired by their ability to keep moving forward,” Haley said.