Echoes from Afghanistan

Wahida Khan, only 7 years old, had no idea what was happening that day in 1979 when violence broke out on the streets of Afghanistan near her elementary school. Teachers locked the children up tight in their classrooms only to disappear, leaving them to listen to increasing chaos outside their doors. Later, someone threw open the classrooms and yelled at them, “Go home!”

A confused Kahn found her older sister and ran to the street where a driver usually waited to take them home. But there was no driver, just people running and screaming. Khan and her sister struggled to understand. “I think it’s the Day of Judgment,” one said to the other. The girls turned toward home, and people ran past them in the opposite direction.

“Guess where the bombs were coming from?” Khan says now, smiling ironically at the memory of being a second grader walking into a war zone. Even now, Khan remembers how her mother watched one man behead another with what looked like a saw or a machete. The body collapsed onto the ground, but the attacker was unsatisfied. He began hacking the corpse to pieces.

Sitting safely over coffee in a Sacramento café, Khan almost laughs at the absurdity of it.

Standing no more than 5-feet tall with exotically outlined brown eyes, Khan can tell the most gruesome stories with a grin.

Since escaping to the United States as a 15 year old in 1986, Khan has turned her experiences into a vocation. She speaks Dari, which is closely related to Farsi, and uses her hard-won English skills to bridge an important gap. She’s one of the few local translators who can help Afghan women in the Sacramento area negotiate the baffling medical system. She has a foot in both cultures and is working to knit them together for the benefit of the refugee population.

Too often, young children end up translating for their parents. This can be humiliating for conservative Afghan women who have gone from burkas to forthright conversations about their bodies with doctors and their kids.

Kahn anticipates criticism: Why don’t the adults learn English, get jobs, assimilate? She tries to explain how decades of war have traumatized Afghan refugees. Her own parents, she said, are not the same confident people they used to be, and they were once one of Afghanistan’s open-minded families, with two working parents and plans to educate their daughters.

That 1979 Soviet invasion, which is still so vivid for her, would lead to a decade of fighting between the Soviets and various Muslim holy warriors known as the Mujahedeen. Khan’s family never knew another day of peace in Afghanistan, and Khan never even returned to school.

Khan retells many grisly accounts as if they have been revisited and re-examined until they’ve become smooth and perfectly formed family fairy tales.

One story explains how Khan’s mother drifted among the Mujahedeen, who were looking for bare-headed women to slaughter. She was praying, “God willing, help me,” and moving through a gauntlet of men as if invisible. As she passed through, one finally yelled, “Get her!” And just then, a local Imam, a Muslim religious leader, appeared and snatched her away, lying and telling the attackers she was his sister.

“She lost her color for months,” says Khan.

Another story explains how a soldier raided the family home and found a letter from a family member in America. Luckily, it was written in code. “If you’re sick, you must go see the doctor” was really a call for the family to flee. “If the soldiers knew we were trying to leave the country, we would be dead,” Khan said. But they never found out.

Of all the near misses, Khan’s stories of her father are the most touching. Imprisoned without explanation for months at a time, and aware that any attempted escape could lead to a death sentence for his family, he nevertheless applied for refugee status and secretly moved them all from Kabul south to the more conservative city of Kandahar. Even Khan didn’t know of his plans to cross the border into Pakistan.

But secret escapes were common, Khan found. Families hid in their homes for months, and then, maybe weeks after their escape, everyone would suddenly realize they had disappeared.

Though they crossed to safety in Pakistan, the family still faced constant suspicion, said Khan. War refugees were not welcomed in Pakistan, and the family had no way to earn money. They stretched their resources, waiting for clearance to join Khan’s grandfather in the United States—her grandfather died in 2000, said Khan, still believing that one day he would return to a free and independent Afghanistan.

The war taught Khan to be comfortable with violence and uncertainty. High school in Queens, N.Y., taught her to stand up for herself.

Afghan culture was so conservative and segregated that an illiterate 15-year-old girl would have been no surprise. According to UNESCO, less than 13 percent of adult women in Afghanistan were literate in 2004—even after years of international efforts to educate them. But in the United States, Khan was an anomaly. She had to learn to read and write in English without the benefit of ESL classes and caught up only with the help of sympathetic teachers. She almost quit once, but her parents needed her to be “their ears and their eyes.”

In Afghanistan, said Khan, the genders were segregated. A woman couldn’t even discuss her body openly with a male doctor. Everything is described as a “stomach ache.” These attitudes have not changed simply because refugees began new lives in the United States.

The needs of Sacramento’s Afghan community might have remained under the radar except that a local refugee-resettlement organization became interested in smaller immigrant populations in Sacramento during the 1990s. The influx of Hmong and Russian refugees was grabbing headlines, but Maureen Huang, executive director of Opening Doors, saw a small trickle of Bosnian refugees. They were traumatized, unfamiliar with Western culture and in need of mental-health services. A research study by Opening Doors helped “put the Bosnians on the map,” said Huang, so a psychologist in Yolo County contacted Opening Doors when he started seeing a similar influx of Afghan patients.

“He noticed that a number of the Afghans coming to him had issues that were more suited to case management than talk therapy,” Huang explained.

The California Endowment funded an Opening Doors research study for Afghans, as well. The first step was finding Khan and a male researcher to survey local refugees.

Because the population in Sacramento and West Sacramento is fairly small—between 6,000 and 9,000, Huang estimated—most medical clinics don’t offer them language services.

“It’s very pragmatic,” said Huang. “If you have to choose between [translating for] 100,000 Russians and 3,000 Bosnians, what makes sense?”

Though Khan’s survey results have not yet been analyzed and released (for that, the organization needs more funds), Huang said there was one thing she noticed after the Afghan community was surveyed. “The women have all the aches and pains and the men have the diabetes and heart disease. … I think the women talk more.”

Khan’s recently taken on another grant-funded project, and this one makes use of her natural protectiveness over other Afghan refugees. She’s the project coordinator for Afghan Women’s Health, a project that attacks the two most significant barriers to health care: language and transportation. So now, Afghan women count on Khan as an educator, a translator and a shuttle service. They also can count on her as an advocate.

If you ever run into an angry, petite woman telling clinic staff to be more respectful to shy Afghan clients who’ve been through hell in their home countries, that’s probably Khan. A natural storyteller, she’s already collecting new anecdotes.

At a recent appointment, Khan was convincing a doctor to examine a woman who had made an appointment but was about to be turned away because of a clerical error. As she finished convincing the medical staff that clerical errors were their problem, not the client’s, a woman in the waiting room intervened. “You’re not nice,” she told Khan. “I don’t know why you don’t just go back to your own country.”

Khan never ceases to be surprised that Americans revert to this: Why don’t you just go home? She says she’s been hearing that a lot lately—even as President George W. Bush sends more American troops to fight the Taliban.

During a February 15 speech, Bush said that “Across Afghanistan last year, the number of roadside bomb attacks almost doubled, direct fire attacks on international forces almost tripled, and suicide bombings grew nearly five-fold. These escalating attacks were part of a Taliban offensive that made 2006 the most violent year in Afghanistan since the liberation of the country.”

Though Khan doesn’t plan to “go home,” the continuing violence puts a strain on the families of Afghan refugees lucky enough to settle in the United States—and Khan does count herself lucky. She and her family can now check in tentatively with cousins and uncles still living in Kabul and Kandahar by phone, though other family members are still missing, scattered by war.

“Our families are not complete,” she said. “You won’t find any complete families from Afghanistan in the U.S. And I’m not talking about the dead. The dead are dead. I’m talking about people who are still lost.”