Book club provides escape for Afghan refugees
After learning about the pain and hardship experienced by Afghan evacuee children, Aleena Turekian, 12, thought of a perfect escape for them that would also provide an opportunity to learn some English: The fictional world of Pancake Court.
Since November, Aleena, a seventh grader in Washington, D.C., has moderated a weekly Sunday online book club — around author Annie Barrows’ popular Ivy and Bean children’s book series — for a growing number of Afghan kids, who log in from Rwanda, Virginia, California and other areas touched by the massive airlift out of Kabul that began when the Taliban gained control in August.
Their budding friendships offer a sense of belonging that many of the participants yearned for after their lives were uprooted by the chaos in their native country. The Afghan children — mostly girls — share their favorite pop songs on a book club playlist and collectively groan whenever someone’s older relative comments off camera. All of them have become big fans of the American preteen who brought them together.
“Hi Aleena!” each participant cheerfully called out in tentative English after joining one recent Zoom session.
“How was everybody’s weekend?” Aleena asked.
“It was good,” said Hina Salarzai, 10, the club’s first member, before sharing the details of a trip that day to a hotel swimming pool near her home in Kigali, Rwanda. “That was so much fun!”
Aleena got the idea for the book club after meeting Hina online through her father, Vaughan Turekian, the director of policy and global affairs for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
The group helped train dozens of Afghan professionals who went on to play key roles in their U.S.-backed government and Afghanistan’s civil society.
After the Taliban seized control, Turekian and his colleagues scrambled to find flights out of the country for those people and their families.
Among the first families to benefit from the NASEM effort was that of Naeem Salarzai, Hina’s father, who oversaw water management affairs in Afghanistan under former president Ashraf Ghani.
The family made it onto a commercial flight and eventually landed in Rwanda, whose government NASEM had persuaded to take in Afghan scientists and engineers and provide them with work visas.
Vaughan Turekian flew there in September to check on the family and met Salarzai’s talkative daughter, who shared her desire to learn more English.
He suggested she meet his daughter Aleena. The girls developed an online friendship that soon evolved into something more ambitious.
“I just felt so upset that she wasn’t able to have the same privilege of education that I am able to have,” said Aleena, whose extracurricular schedule includes fencing, track and field and French lessons. “So, we decided to do a book club together to read and to help her with her English.”
Aleena turned to her old collection of Ivy and Bean books, a popular series about two 7-year-old best friends in a small American town, geared toward readers ages 6 to 9.
Hina, who hopes to live in the United States, became hooked — though not immediately.
“At first, it was so boring,” she said. “But now I am understanding it. I really like it.”
Their club grew after other Afghan children arrived in Rwanda and learned about the sessions from Hina.
Then, word of mouth spread to newly resettled Afghans in the United States, and even a teenage boy in Kabul still hoping to leave.
Now, with 16 regular book club members, Aleena is the master of ceremonies for a world free of worries about violence or persecution and, instead, filled with quandaries such as how to explain certain American words to a group of Afghan children.
“Aleena, I’m sorry. What does that mean?” one girl asked during a session.
“Boogers?” Aleena replied, sighing before trying to describe dried nasal mucus politely. Giving up, she searched for images of people picking their noses and shared them on her screen.
“Oh! I understand now,” the girl said, while the group erupted in giggles.