Member-only story
I grew up with the stories of my parents’ escape from Afghanistan…Now we’re living it.
My dad was an Afghan refugee and my mom is Pakistani, but they both escaped from Afghanistan when the coup happened in the 1970s, and they had to get smuggled out. So it was it was a very similar experience in a lot of ways to what’s going on now. It was really coming full circle for me this time. There was a lot of trauma for a lot of first and second generation Afghans reliving what has been lived through in the last century. So I grew up with those stories. I mean, my entire life was impacted by the fact that we had to escape our homeland.
And so seeing how the migration journey that I had and that my parents had, which is very different. I was a kid. They were adults. And so we had two very, very different experiences and seeing what that was like, growing up hearing those stories. And then coming here, it was really surreal to kind of see the fall of Afghanistan again. And to see it not just from the perspective of these stories that my parents have lived, but also that is a failure of 20 years of not understanding what is essentially at the heart of it is very much theological problem.
And we saw that with the way the Taliban was being interviewed, so to speak, I can’t say that they were really being interviewed. They were just being questioned, giving all the wrong…
