San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
School helps house Afghan refugees
Marmar Hakim, 21, outside the student apartment building where she and her mother lived in Belmont.
“To not have to worry about where and how you’re going to live after escaping the Taliban, it’s good.”
The first time their plane tickets were canceled because they didn’t have a male relative accompanying them on the flight, Marmar Hakim and her mother grappled with the possibility of never leaving Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
Then their flights were canceled two more times.
Nine months later, on a hot August day, Hakim strolled the grounds of Notre Dame de Namur University, a small, nonprofit college
Marmar Hakim, who escaped Afghanistan with her mother
in San Mateo County. The campus, tucked in a quiet suburban community surrounded by treeshrouded hills, held a special resonance for the 21-year-old and her mom:
It was their home for two months after they finally made it to the United States.
“To not have to worry about where and how you’re going to live after escaping the Taliban, it’s good,” Hakim told The Chronicle.
The 171-year-old Catholic university is part of a national campaign that asks institutions of higher learning to set aside some student
housing for the approximately 76,000 Afghan refugees who have been admitted into the country since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan 12 months ago. The goal of the Every Campus a Refuge program, started in 2015 by Guilford College English professor Diya Abdo, is to convince each American college or university to provide temporary campus housing to at least one refugee family. Temporary housing “is incredibly important because it removes the stressor of finances,” said Abdo, whose university is in North Carolina.
Only 18 campuses have answered Abdo’s call in the past seven years. Notre Dame de Namur, which takes its name from the Belgian city where its founding nuns came from, says it was the first university on the West Coast to do so, in keeping with a social justice philosophy that also made it the first in California to offer undergraduate degrees to women. The muted response comes at a complicated time for higher learning institutions, and a poignant one for Afghanistan, where the Taliban has contradicted its early promises to be more moderate and greatly restricted women’s access to education, jobs and the right to choose their own destinies.
As many campuses struggle to provide enough housing for their student bodies, a campaign is asking them to set aside dormitories and apartments to soften the landing for thousands of displaced Afghans, many of them women, who succeeded in escaping a brutal regime only to enter a housing crisis.
Getting into college
Notre Dame de Namur, which has fewer than 600 students, is a modest player in the greater campaign.
The university has 36 apartment units for graduate-level students at its Belmont campus. Under a pilot program financed by the International Rescue Committee, it has thus far loaned four apartments to five families, or 13 people, and is in the process of renovating eight apartments to accommodate as many as 36 refugees total, said Bobby Vaughn, a school spokesperson.
There is an upper limit of 150 days for families to stay before they have to find longerterm housing, which the IRC, a nonprofit resettlement agency, is tasked with working with them to find.
The IRC says it has helped an estimated 4,000 Afghan refugees resettle in the Bay Area and Sacramento region.
California’s pandemicstoked housing market has made temporary housing even scarcer, said Mizgon Darby, the communications director for IRC’s Northern California office. Notre Dame de Namur is the first university to partner with the IRC to navigate the shortage of temporary housing, an arrangement the university wants to make permanent.
“By providing this service, we can put individuals on the path to long-term success,” Notre Dame de Namur president Beth Martin said at an Aug. 15 news conference.
Both Notre Dame de Namur and Every Campus a Refuge have only been able to help so many. According to Abdo, the program’s founder, ECAR has found temporary campus housing for 151 people in seven years, a fraction of what Abdo hoped to have inspired this long into the campaign.
The IRC receives $2,275 in federal funding for each Afghan refugee it serves. Half the money is meant for three months of relocation services, and the remainder is supposed to stake each refugee toward a new life.
Under its Afghan Support and Investment Program, California allocated an additional $38.2 million to resettlement agencies to help find housing for refugees arriving in the U.S. between July 31, 2021, and Sept. 30.
The IRC has used that funding to place 442 families into transitional and permanent housing statewide. The organization declined to say how many individuals were served, but Darby estimated the amount to be around 2,210 people since last August, when considering the average Afghan family numbered five members.
Family size became a challenge for Notre Dame da Namur. The
Marmar Hakim chats with Nasir Rahy, her caseworker from the International Rescue Committee.
university limits three people to its one-bedroom apartments. In families with one parent, they cannot occupy more than one apartment, since at least one adult must be in each apartment per the school’s rules. This is why some units are empty.
For Hakim, getting into the school’s housing was a blessing.
Pursuing a dream, exiting a nightmare
Hakim was studying communications in her third year of university when the Taliban began retaking swaths of the country ahead of the announced U.S. withdrawal at the end of August 2021.
Since Hakim lost her father at the age of 3, it was mostly just her and her mom, who worked for the the Afghanistan Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Together, they traveled 200 miles south to Kabul, where Hakim had an uncle. They huddled in his home on the day the Taliban recaptured the capital city on Aug.
15, 2021.
Hakim saw her past life evaporate before her eyes. The days of hanging out with friends, of watching Bollywood movies, her mother’s career — those were fading.
“Each day there was painful, anxious and worrisome,” Hakim said of her final days in Afghanistan.
Finally, after three canceled plane tickets and months of trying, they were out of the country. In mid-April, they landed at an American military base in Qatar, where they spent a month before flying into Los Angeles. Then they headed to their current destination, the Bay Area.
Hakim said she has a cousin with whom they stayed for a week before moving into a hotel for two weeks, set up by the IRC, which also helped them get the temporary apartment at Notre Dame de Namur University.
In August, she and her mother moved into an apartment in Hayward, and Hakim is now planning to pursue a lifelong dream: becoming a dentist. She’s planning to enroll in community college, transfer to a four-year university and then head to dental school.
That career path wasn’t an option back home, even before the Taliban reclaimed control. But as Afghanistan marks its first anniversary under Taliban rule this month, the options are even scarcer for women. Today, most girls cannot attend secondary schools. Women cannot travel long distances without the company of male relatives. Some are forced to leave jobs. Some have been forced to marry Taliban fighters and have been imprisoned and tortured for disobeying Taliban laws.
As she walked by the graduate-student apartments she and her mother spent two months in, Hakim recounted what it was like growing up in Afghanistan’s Balkh province, her sorrow of having to leave and her gratitude for reaching the U.S. The emotions tumbled together, turning into something knotted and tender.
“I’m excited for my life here, but at the same time I’m sad about my life in Afghanistan,” Hakim reflected. “I miss my country, I miss my family, I miss my old friends. One day, I hope to go back to visit.”