Mothers who fled Afghanistan for Philadelphia are welcoming 16 babies. They got a baby shower.

'i want him to have a good life'

TPHILADELPHIA— he invitations were written in Dari, Pashto and English. The food included traditional Afghan fare, platters of dried fruits and cups of hot tea.

The babies were, well, adorable.

By turn they cried out loud or slept in silence, as around them balloons popped and plates spilled and older siblings laughed and ran across a brightly decorated conference room on the second floor of a Center City hotel.

That’s where newly arrived Afghan mothers and mothers-to-be were welcomed to an old American tradition — a baby shower, and a big one, thrown by Nationalities Service Center, the immigrant-services agency that leads the Philadelphia region’s effort to resettle hundreds of evacuees from fallen, war-riven Afghanistan.

Some of the little ones who arrived alert in their mothers’ arms or dozing in plastic carriers are new American citizens, born in this country after their parents reached temporary “safehaven” housing on U.S. military bases. Other babies were born in Afghanistan shortly before the Taliban takeover, held close as their families crammed aboard huge C-17 Globemasters that carried them up and out of their homeland.

None yet knows of their parents’ perilous evacuation from Kabul, of the abiding fear and torment for family members left behind, or how, as they cooed or gurgled or smiled during the baby shower, around them swirled their mothers’ dreams for their futures.

“I want him to have an education, and a good life, and a good job,” said Madina Mohammad, who cradled her 3month-old son, Younus, named for the faithful prophet who delivered messages from Allah.

Her baby, then still in the womb, traveled 7,000 miles from a crumbling Afghanistan

to be born in South Jersey, at a hospital near Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.

The child paid no mind to a shower that grew chaotically joyful, with balloons bouncing across tabletops and the volume of conversation

rising in three languages — an event “to celebrate all the women who care for others,” said Christina Kubica, NSC’s manager of specialized health services.

Read more at www.postgazette.com/goodness.

Heather Khalifa/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS A gift box is given to Madina Mohammad, who is holding her 3-month-old son, Younus, at a baby shower for the Afghan women and their children living in the Philadelphia Residence Inn by Marriott.