One year ago, a nascent team of Montview Presbyterian members calling ourselves the Afghan Refugee Cultural Mentoring Team was awaiting the arrival of two Afghan families who were traveling to Denver from U.S. military bases.

We had undergone minimal cultural awareness training, raised money for rent, rented and furnished houses, stocked the kitchen and bought clothing – all with the generous support of this congregation. But we had no idea what to expect in the coming year.

What we relied on was a national study that concluded that assimilation by immigrants to the United States was most successful when the families mixed with resident Americans as well as people from their own culture. We have kept that as a guiding principle.

The only insight the families had to what they would face came from snatches of WhatsApp conversations with relatives who were already here.

Javed and Fatima S. had hustled their six children, including twin infant boys, to Kabul from their home in Jalalabad in August 2021 and were evacuated to Qatar and then a military base on the East Coast. Their close friends and relatives-by-marriage, Ajmal and Rona J. had evacuated Kabul with their three children under age 3 to a base in the Midwest. [We are withholding surnames and some details to protect their security.]

All were exhausted and missing the parents and siblings they left behind, but they looked forward to being reunited with Rona’s brother, Zarghon H, and her late brother’s widow, Nadia. Both families were being assisted by a Virginia Village group led by Montview member Becca Siever. [In September of this year, two more siblings and their families moved here, too.]

We want to tell you a little of what has occurred in the 12 months since we welcomed them to Denver.

Javed, who is the nephew of Zarghon’s wife, and Fatima settled into a small house in Cory-Merrill that a generous landlord is renting to them at a below-market rate. Their oldest children, Hilal, Amina and Fareja, are enrolled in school at a so-called “newcomer” school operated by Denver Public Schools to immerse immigrant children in English and American culture. They are speaking English well enough to even interpret for Fatima at times, and they beam with happiness and enthusiasm for school. Four-year-old Alia is shy and twins Ayaz and Riaz, 18 months, are adorable and full of mischief.

Javed began work as a stock clerk at Safeway, but soon got hired at a defense contractor in Lakewood where he is in training to become a machinist. He has bought two used cars, one to transport his large family and a compact car he uses to drive for Lyft and Door Dash. Fatima is sewing with the Afghan Women’s Collective and exudes pride over being able to send money home to her mother in Jalalabad, where food is scarce.

Javed has taken English lessons online from the Emily Griffith School with tutoring by Dennis Shull. Now his employer has hired a tutor at the work site. Star Fennell tutors Fatima in English with very good results. Mary Deffenbaugh gives the school-aged children some extra tutoring and love as well.

Meanwhile, Ajmal and Rona settled with their three youngsters into a small apartment building in Virginia Village, just blocks from Zarghon and Nadia’s houses and a half-mile from Javed and Fatima. Rohid and Tohid, the toddler and baby, initially seemed traumatized by their travel but tears have given way to smiles, joyful bouncing and blown kisses. Four-year-old Alia is loving and smart but was unable to enter preschool this fall; we hope to enroll her for the winter semester along with Javed and Fatima’s Alia.

With John Gonder and Lydia Loopesko’s help, Ajmal got a job as an overnight stocking clerk at King Sooper. The hours were grueling because he found it hard to sleep in the daytime when the children were awake, and the children found it hard to sleep without him at night. Two months ago, he joined Javed at the defense contractor plant, and Ajmal is thrilled. Ajmal had suspended his online English lessons while working overnight hours, and is now working with a tutor at work. He has bought a compact car and is commuting to work with Javed.

Rona, who was a rare Afghan woman who’d been college educated, has focused on learning English so she might return to her profession as a midwife. She will enroll in doula training at Denver Health in January and, later, a two-year midwifery program. She’s taken English classes at Emily Griffith, watched endless YouTube videos and gotten tutoring from Pat Pascoe.

Both families are awaiting a decision on asylum. Both got help from the Colorado Lawyers Committee in preparing the excruciatingly detailed applications for asylum and special immigrant visas. With Montview’s financial help, they secured an excellent lawyer at low-bono rates to shepherd them through the asylum interviews. One family’s interview was in September; the other has an interview date later this month. Inshallah, or “if God wills,” as our friends say in Pashto.

Diane Bassett is the primary contact for Javed and Fatima, and Jan Paul and Carol VanStory have helped the Ajmal and Rona.

Both families have been blessed to get significant help from the government, from Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountain (the resettlement agency) and especially from this amazingly generous church. The families are beginning to pay rent themselves, with help from the money Montview raised last year. They had TANF grants until the men got jobs, and they’ve gotten SNAP and WIC money to help with groceries. We’ve identified sources of free food, diapers and clothing to help stretch their dollars. All family members have gotten top-notch medical care from Denver Health, and most have received long-overdue dental care.

The families are grateful, and they report their parents are relieved and grateful as well.

“We know that no other country would have done for us what the United States has done,” Javed said earnestly. Of course, he, Ajmal and their male relatives all risked their lives and those of their families working for the U.S. military in Jalalabad before Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.

You might ask, what’s next?

• English lessons and more English lessons. We will help Javed and Ajmal take their English proficiency to the next level so they can advance in their careers. We’ll do the same with Rona, and we’ll continue to work with Fatima on conversational English.
  
  
• Financial literacy. Afghan people typically live in family compounds that have been handed down for generations. As such, rent, mortgages and budgets in general are unfamiliar concepts. We will be redoubling our efforts to help them budget for expected and unexpected expenses, taking advantage of whatever government help for which, they qualify while also building a credit history.
  
  
• Expand our social activities with the two families. We’ve spent a great deal of time taking them to medical appointments and working on logistics around education and housing. We’ve taken them to the Zoo, Botanic Gardens, area playgrounds and trick-or-treating. We want to expand those social activities to introduce them to all that Denver has to offer.

Along the way, we have learned much about these families, and we love them more than we thought possible. We are so dissimilar: They are brown, Muslim, in some cases preliterate, sheltered and introverted. We are white, Christian, educated, busy and extroverted. We like comfortable furniture; they like carpeted floors, walls lined with seating pads and virtually no furniture.

But what unites us is greater than those differences. We all love our families and want our children to excel beyond our dreams. In their case, they left behind the known quantities of family and Afghan culture so the next generation might secure education and better jobs in this scary new world. These families have eschewed moving to Afghan enclaves in the Northglenn/Thornton areas as are the other families so their children can attend Denver’s excellent newcomer schools.

We break bread to commune with one another on common ground. In their case, it’s green tea, nuts and dates, and the yummiest Middle Eastern food you’ll ever taste while seated on floor cushions. In ours, it’s tea and cookies while sitting on a sectional sofa.

What began with formal handshakes and smiles a year ago has given way to hugs, expressions of love and genuine laughter over shared experiences.

When Lutheran Family Services asked each of us to make a commitment of three to six months, we readily agreed. We’re now at 12 months. One of our team members recently asked, What’s the endgame here? How long will we be in these families’ lives?

Several of us shrugged and said we didn’t know. But some of us cannot imagine ever not being part of their lives.

We are their American grandparents.

– Submitted by Jan Paul, Diane Bassett, Carol VanStory, Lorraine Alcott, John Gonder, Pat Pascoe, Lydia Loopesco, Dennis Shull, Star Fennell, Mary Deffenbaugh, Doug Easton