10/09/2021
(O&B original post by Paul Van Auken)
Refugees fleeing Afghanistan have been in the news a lot lately. Roughly 9,000 people are currently being housed temporarily at Fort McCoy in Southwestern Wisconsin, with a total of as many as 13,000 expected by later in the fall.
World Relief -- one of nine nonprofit resettlement agencies that contract with the U.S. government and coordinate with them and the UN to find new homes for refugees from around the world -- expects to resettle about 100 Afghan people in the Fox Valley by March 2022 through their Appleton/Oshkosh offices.
A refugee is a person forced to flee their country due to violence or persecution. Further, refugees have a “a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Most likely, they cannot return home or are afraid to do so” (UNHCR 2018b: Para. 1). While the Afghans at Fort McCoy and who are eventually resettled in the Fox Valley as a result of the current crisis will likely not be refugees in technical sense (they will likely have the odd moniker of "humanitarian parolee", or in some cases, SIV-holder), they will all come as refugees, fleeing for their lives, in the broader sense.
Welcoming refugees is nothing new for Oshkosh and the Fox Valley. In fact, although it is only the 9th-biggest city in the state, Oshkosh has resettled the 2nd-most refugees in Wisconsin since 2002, behind only Milwaukee.
There have been Afghans resettled in Wisconsin (121 between 2002 and 2016 - very few refugees were resettled at all during the Trump administration), but there have been many more people from Burma, Laos, Somalia, Iraq, the Congo, and Bhutan resettled in Wisconsin during this period. So, there will be less of an established network of other Afghans in the Fox Valley for new arrivals to tap into in the critical, initial stage of their resettlement.
Through a collaborative research project centered at UW Oshkosh and funded in part through an applied research grant from WiSys, a group of us have had the privilege of surveying, interviewing, and spending time with residents with refugee background (RRB) from the Fox Valley, Milwaukee, and Madison. We also produced a photo-based exhibit, funded in part by the Wisconsin Humanities Council, which is now semi-permanently on display on the walls of the fourth floor of Sage Hall on the UW Oshkosh campus next to the Department of Sociology offices.
We had a very memorable interview a couple years ago with an Afghan, who like many of the people now housed at Fort McCoy, came to the U.S. on a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV). SIVs are granted to people who have assisted the U.S. government/military or NATO allies, for example as translators, as Jawad* did during the war in Afghanistan for over six years. SIV holders are not technically categorized as refugees but are eligible for most of the same services as RRBs (while "humanitarian parole" is a rarely utilized program that has still different provisions).
Jawad is not his real name. We changed it for the exhibit because people still want him dead because he worked with the U.S. military.
The son of a military officer, Jawad was a year away from completing a Bachelor's degree in law prior to joining the war effort.
By the time we met him, about three years after he arrived in the Fox Valley, he had finished an Associate's degree at the tech, enrolled in a UW system university pursuing a business degree, had a solid full-time job, and owned a house. He welcomed us into his home and treated us like old friends.
Jawad had big dreams and, compared to other RRBs -- all of whom are dealing with very serious trauma, but many had not had the opportunity to be as well-educated or learn English like he had -- was making quick progress towards achieving them. He prized the safety he felt in the Fox Valley and reported that he was welcomed here and not only had a network of other Afghans, but also had made friends with majority Wisconsinites, too. He lamented, however, that many people seemed to not understand people from minority groups, let alone his Afghan culture or Muslim religion. His main worry, though, was that his parents and siblings remained in Afghanistan, despite his best efforts to bring them over to join him, and that they were unsafe. Just imagine how he and others like him are feeling now.
Describing his life back in Afghanistan, Jawad noted,
"I was a very social person. Calm, athletic. I used to play soccer. For a long time over there. A very friendly person and a very patriotic person. So, I always wanted to help my people in my country to succeed. You know, I worked in the Afghan military before. I started working with the U.S military just to bring peace just to help people you know live in safety. People describe me as a good Afghan soldier who always tried to protect people. "
His primary mentor encouraged him to join to apply to be a interpreter for the U.S.
"And he knew that I was almost done with the Afghan military. I was done with my term. Like three years. He said, 'Well, are you trying to enlist or do something different?' I was like, 'I don’t know, I’ll have to decide. That’s a hard decision to make.' And then he said, 'Well, your English is good you’re going to English classes and you have prior military experience, and you know three other languages as well, so why don’t you work for us?' I was like 'as a what?' He said, 'as an interpreter', I was like, 'I don’t know if I can interpret.' He was like, 'we have a lot of interpreters that speak like English so you are very qualified for that.' So, I said okay. So I took the test and I passed it and waited for a background check and as soon as I was done with the Afghan military I started working the next week."
He shared some recollections of his experiences working in this role.
"The reason I first joined the Afghan military was to help my people, you know, to have a safe living conditions. And I went to combat all the time and you know I fought as usual. When I became an interpreter for the U.S military I have a lot of crazy situations where I was in you know fight or flight for like 16-17 hours. Like all the time. The place where I was working as an interpreter was one of the worst places in the West. So I was there for 6-7 months then I could go home for a month and go back so I was like in … all the time, way far from home."
He continued,
"A lot of things as an interpreter, I was not only an interpreter, translator, cultural advisor, I was fighting just like a soldier in the U.S military against Taliban. We did not have ISIS at that time but we were on top of the groups fighting against things I did over there. I assisted the U.S military as much as I could. With their intels and you know the cultural barriers between the U.S. military and the Afghan forces. I saved lives, like two American lives that were in combat. Our gunner got shot so he couldn’t, you know, use a weapon anymore so I was in the vehicle, I got up I started helping my friends until we got support. Otherwise we would have been surrounded and killed by those people. That was the best thing that I can remember, when I was an interpreter. The worst thing was when I got injured in an I.E.D. attack. I got injured in twice, but luckily the injury was not really bad so I could recover after two weeks, that was one of the worst things to really happen to me."
After his service ended, Jawad was in grave danger. But he simply had to wait.
"Getting any kind of visa from U.S military, from U.S government is not easy. Going through the visa process is just like a nightmare, it takes forever, but it was a little bit easier for us as U.S military interpreters to get the visa a little quicker. The overall process took me three, three and a half years from the first day that I started the application to the last day I got to the U.S., and there are many forms that you have to fill out there are very long waits. The process is crazy. It’s very lengthy process but for other people to come without any like prior history with the U.S government it takes probably 10 years, 20 years,...like for me to sponsor my siblings to come here takes like 17 to 24 years."
He continued,
"The best time of my life when I got that email from U.S embassy saying your application has been approved, your visa has been issued. There are many many steps that they send you emails for but the last step was you know bring your passport so we can have the visa on it. And then what they said, the last email they sent me was your visa has been issued, bring your passport so you can come pick it up. That was the best time of my life ever. The best news ever. So I got that visa and I didn’t go back to where my parents were because a lot of people knew that you know I was going to come to the U.S. so I stayed the whole month in Kabul, the capital, until I came to the U.S., because I couldn’t go over there. I could go over there, a lot of people knew I had the visa in hand, they would have killed me. So the journey was really tough."
Jawad and his wife could hardly bring anything with them to start their new life in the Fox Valley.
"You could, all together you could bring like 27 pounds of, you know, stuff. In our luggages. Just brought our clothes."
We asked if that was difficult and he replied,
"Its, okay. I mean we didn’t really needed them to be with us to have something like that. But you know now that we don’t have them and kids are really entertaining you know. They just entertain us. We don’t really, you know have that, it’s so hard about those things. We are glad that we have these kids otherwise, you know, we really needed those sentimental things we had over there."
We asked, "So the kids help you live more in the present maybe?" and Jawad responded, "Yes, exactly. They make us forget a lot of things."
As noted, he had very positive things to say about living in this area overall.
"So far I had only one negative interaction with a person.... My wife and I were getting out of the public library in Appleton and there was a guy who was walking and he saw my wife wearing like a scarf and he said, 'Hey are you Muslim?' Like, of course yeah we’re Muslim because you see my wife is wearing you know a scarf. He was like, 'You’re not going to blow us up, right?' I was like, 'We’re not going to blow you up, trust me. We’re not those kind of people.' He was like, 'Well, I heard all the Muslims are bad people.' I was like, 'All the Muslims? There are like 1.3, 1.4 billion Muslims in the world and you have no idea who these people are, where they live. Can tell me one country that you know has a majority population, Muslim population?' He was quiet. He didn’t respond to me because he didn’t know what’s going on. So I was like and he was like, 'Okay okay let's talk about this.' And he said, 'I heard from a lot of people that Muslims are doing, you know, su***de attacks killing innocent people.' I was like, 'No, whoever told you is wrong because I’m a Muslim, as a Muslim not, you know, every single person is bad.' I said, 'I worked for the U.S military for six and a half years. I was in combat zone and I worked with the U.S military for like shoulder by shoulder as a soldier.' He was like, 'Oh you’re from us? You’re a good person?' I was like, 'Whatever you think' and then he apologized and left. That was the worst interaction I had with a person, since we got here.'
He told us about how wonderful it is to have a home, how he sees Americans working way too much and Afghans tending to have a lower standard of living but being content with less and having a huge commitment to family, and a lot more.
The photos taken by our collaborator, Colin Crowley, were designed to capture how he and his family live now and their hopes for the future. Jawad was clearly focused primarily on providing a good life for his children and reuniting with his family. He concluded our interview with,
"My hopes for the future are just to you know, be able to get my bachelor degree and master degree. More importantly, just see if I can bring my parents and siblings here. That’s the toughest thing that I’m really thinking about everyday, every second, every minute."
(And again, he said this before the Taliban retook the country.)
Because Jawad's identity needed to be concealed, he and Colin had to be creative to capture portraits of him and his family. The result was probably the most striking photos in the exhibit, as shown in triptrych from our first publication from the project (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/3/73/htm), as they were displayed in the formal exhibit, and individually as attached. In the photo in which Jawad is looking out his door (perhaps pondering what the future holds), the precious father-daughter scene was not contrived; Colin captured the spontaneous moment when Jawad's daughter came to grab her father's hand in the doorway.
