Teaching with Words
Stories & Perspectives
Stories that deepen understanding of Afghan refugees, displacement, resilience, and community
What Rescue Really Means
By: Aatira Shah
On August 15, 2021, Husna was in fifth grade, sitting through her last class period of the day, when something felt off.
She already knew the Taliban was coming to Kabul. Her family had been watching the news, tracking cities falling one by one. Her father had lived through their first rule in the 1990s and understood exactly what their return would mean, especially for his daughters. What Husna didn’t know was that it would happen so fast, or that the walk home from school that afternoon would be one of the last ordinary things she would do in Afghanistan.
“I was just kind of really sad,” she said, recalling that day. “Because I knew that they would come to Kabul sometime, but we didn’t know when.”
There is something unbearable about that sentence. Not the fear in it, but the resignation. An eleven-year-old who had already learned to hold dread quietly, to carry it to school, to sit with it through a last period class and still not know that last was the word for it. She was a child doing homework in a country that was disappearing underneath her.
Husna is now a tenth grader at KIPP Sharpstown in Houston. She is one of nearly 97,000 Afghans evacuated to the United States in the weeks after Kabul fell, part of a crisis that produced the largest Afghan refugee community in American history. She is also, by most measures, one of the success stories: in school, in Houston, building a life. But her story raises a question that the numbers alone cannot answer: what does rescue actually mean?
• • •
The images from Kabul Airport that August are difficult to forget. Crowds surging toward military planes. Taliban fighters firing into the air. People clinging to aircraft as they lifted off. Mothers passing infants to strangers just to get them through. For the Afghans fighting to board those flights, the airport represented something more than an exit. It was the last legible boundary between the life they had built and the uncertainty ahead. Between who they had been and who they would have to become.
Most of those who made it out entered the U.S. under a legal mechanism called humanitarian parole, a temporary status that permits someone to remain in the country for safety but provides no path to permanent residency. It is a stopgap, not a solution. A door held open without any promise of what lies beyond it.
The word “resettled” carries, if you listen to it, a kind of impossible optimism. As if displacement were simply a question of furniture. As if what had been uprooted could be set back down in a new city and take hold the way a houseplant does, given enough light and water. The reality is more like trying to read a book in a language being learned at the same time the book is being written. Everything happening at once. Everything urgent. And underneath it all, a grief with no clean name, because the place you are mourning still exists on a map. You just cannot go back to it.
Three years later, many Afghan families are still waiting: for asylum hearings that stretch years into the future, for Congress to act on the Afghan Adjustment Act, for proof that their lives here are not simply borrowed time.
• • •
The material conditions facing Afghan refugees in the U.S. are well-documented, and they are stark.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, Afghan households earned a median of roughly $48,000 in 2022, compared to approximately $75,000 for U.S.-born households. Nearly 40 percent of Afghans live below the poverty line, more than three times the rate for native-born Americans. More than half report that they do not speak English well. Almost 30 percent have not completed high school, reflecting decades of war that interrupted schooling and Taliban-era policies that denied entire generations of women the chance to attend school at all.
These numbers accumulate into a portrait of compounding disadvantage. Language barriers limit employment, which limits income, which limits housing stability. In cities like San Jose and Sacramento, where nearly 40 percent of the U.S. Afghan population is concentrated, rent costs compound these pressures further. One refugee interviewed by Al Jazeera described her circumstances as “like a living war,” trading one form of precarity for another. She had survived the Taliban. She was now terrified of her landlord.
But the hardest thing to measure is not in the data. It is the texture of a new place: the unspoken grammar of American schools, the social codes that native-born students navigate without thinking, the particular loneliness of being the only person in a classroom who does not yet know the rules of a game everyone else plays by instinct. The loneliness of laughing a half-second too late because you are still translating the joke. Of raising your hand and then putting it down again because you are not sure you have the words. These things cannot be worksheeted. They can only, slowly, be lived.
• • •
Husna learned English quickly. Within a year of arriving she had memorized the bus routes from her apartment to school. She learned which teachers would give her extra time on tests and which ones would not, and calibrated her requests accordingly, a pragmatism that is both impressive and a little heartbreaking to witness in someone so young.
What she struggled with was softer and harder to name.
“Everything was really new,” she said. “And at school, there were a lot of people making fun of me because I was new and I didn’t know English.” At home, her father struggled to find work, confronting employers who, as Husna put it, “thought he came from a place where there was fighting” and wouldn’t see past that assumption to the person in front of them. “They wouldn’t see the other side of it.”
That phrase stays with you. The other side of it. The father who had read the situation clearly enough to save his family, who had protected his daughters from something he had already survived once, who had navigated the chaos of an airport collapse and an ocean and a new country, now sitting across from someone who could only see where he was from. Not who he was. Where he was from.
What Husna describes is a specific kind of invisibility: being perceived as a category before being recognized as a person. It is the experience of carrying a whole history, a whole language, a whole way of understanding the world, into a place that has filed you under a label before you have had a chance to introduce yourself. Of knowing, with a certainty that settles in the chest, that the room sees your crisis before it sees you.
There is a word in Dari — ghurbat — that does not translate neatly into English. It means something like exile or estrangement, but carries a texture those words don’t quite hold. It implies a longing not just for a place but for a version of oneself that existed in that place. A self that spoke fluently, that knew the names of things, that did not have to translate every experience before processing it. A self that did not feel, every single day, like a stranger in its own head.
“I just found myself,” Husna said of eventually adjusting. The phrase is simple. And quietly extraordinary, when you consider everything she had to lose before she could say it.
• • •
The organizations working to close these gaps operate with limited resources against significant need. Nonprofits like Refugee Services of Texas provide housing, food, and financial assistance for up to a year, a crucial buffer, but one that expires. The International Rescue Committee has supported more than 11,000 Afghan refugees with housing, job placement, and legal services. These networks matter. They are also, by their own admission, not enough.
The most durable solutions are legislative. The Afghan Adjustment Act, which would provide a direct pathway to permanent residency for Afghans on humanitarian parole, has been repeatedly stalled in Congress. Advocacy groups argue that every month of delay leaves thousands of families unable to reunite with relatives abroad, unable to travel without risking their ability to return, unable to plan futures with any confidence. Without permanent status, everything remains provisional. Parents cannot make promises to their children that they are sure they can keep. That is its own kind of violence, quieter than the one they fled, but corrosive in ways that take years to fully see.
The stakes of that uncertainty became concrete when executive orders in early 2025 halted refugee processing entirely, leaving Afghans who had spent years building lives in the United States suddenly facing deportation notices while still awaiting asylum decisions. Political change, it turns out, can unravel in months what families spent years carefully constructing. What a person builds in the space between fear and hope is fragile. It should not also be disposable.
• • •
The national conversation about refugees has been reduced, on most platforms, to a set of arguments that have very little to do with Husna. With her handwriting. With the way she talks about finding herself, quietly, without drama, as though it were simply the next thing that had to be done. With the walk home from school she took on August 15th, not yet knowing it was the last one. With the girl she was that morning and the girl she had to start becoming by nightfall.
The policy arguments are real, and they matter. But they have a way of flattening the people they are ostensibly about, of converting a fifth grader on the last ordinary day of her childhood into a data point, a case file, a line in a resettlement report. Of forgetting that behind every statistic is someone who once sat in a classroom and felt, with a child’s whole body, that something was wrong.
What refugee students need, beyond English lessons and legal status and affordable housing, is something harder to legislate: to be seen with enough specificity that the seeing itself becomes a form of welcome. To be recognized not as the sum of what happened to them, but as full people who arrived carrying that history and who intend to build something new with it anyway.
Rescue, if it means anything, has to mean more than extraction. It has to mean stability. Not just an entry, but a place to actually arrive. Not just safety from the thing they fled, but the chance, at last, to simply be.
Aatira Shah is a junior at Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart in Houston, Texas. She is the founder of YAAL Houston, a refugee tutoring and mentorship organization, and the host of Unlocked Voices, a podcast about Afghan refugees in America.
The Tea Was Already Poured
By: Aatira Shah
When I first met the family, newly arrived from Afghanistan, their lives folded into a couple of suitcases and a dozen memories they didn’t talk about. I thought I was coming to teach. English and math, mostly. I thought I would be the one offering help, knowledge, comfort. But from the moment I stepped through their door, it was clear I would be learning just as much as I was teaching.
Their apartment was small but full of warmth. The floor was covered with plain rugs, the kind you sit on, stretch out on, pray on. No framed art. Just a couch, a tea set, and the quiet hum of a family trying to settle into a country that didn’t speak their language.
The youngest children, Muhammad and Diana, peeked out from behind their mother’s side, clutching the hem of her dress. The two eldest, Husna and Neda, and their older cousin, Zenab, stood politely. Their eyes were bright, eager, but hesitant. They were middle school age then, holding notebooks they had already begun to fill with English words they couldn’t yet pronounce.
The first thing I noticed was their hospitality. Before I could sit down, before I could even introduce myself, someone had brought me tea. It was warm, sweet, and slightly spiced, poured carefully into a small china cup. Their mother gestured for me to sit on the floor and smiled as if I were family. No one had taught them to be this generous. It was part of them. Not just manners. The kind you carry with you no matter what country you're in.
Teaching them began with grammar and multiplication, but it quickly turned into something more. The girls were determined in a way I rarely see, even among students born here. Neda would ask questions until she understood every part of a sentence. Zenab would solve a math problem five different ways just to make sure she really got it. And sometimes, when I would come, we wouldn’t do any schoolwork at all. We would just sit and talk. They’d ask me for advice, about homework, friendships, college, America. They wanted to learn, always. Not just for themselves, I think, but for their mother. For a future that felt fragile and precious and earned.
But their transition wasn’t simple. It never is.
At school, they were often invisible, they told me. Not because they lacked the ability to speak, but because no one slowed down long enough to listen. They had their own little Afghan circle of friends in each grade, but they wanted more than that. They wanted to connect. To grow. To belong. I remember Husna telling me, in the quietest voice, “I didn’t talk for a long time. At lunch, I would just sit and eat. I didn’t want to say something wrong.” It wasn’t just about language. It was fear. Fear of standing out. Fear of being laughed at. Fear of being known only as the refugee.
They spoke two languages between them. I’m pretty sure it was Dari and English - they were absorbing like soil absorbs rain. But fluency in English didn’t erase the divide they felt culturally.
They memorized vocabulary flashcards. Sometimes we’d watch music videos together on the TV near the kitchen, pointing out words, lyrics, and laughing when we got them wrong. They asked questions with boldness. When I showed them a book, simple, illustrated, with short sentences, they treated it like treasure. They didn’t just read. They devoured. I could see something shift in them as English became more familiar. Their voices grew steadier. Their questions became more specific. Their silences felt less heavy.
Still, home was always there. In their language, their clothes, the food simmering in the kitchen when I arrived.
They weren’t trying to leave Afghanistan behind. They were carrying it with them, and learning to balance it with this new world. Some days, they wore leggings and hoodies. Other days, they came to our sessions with henna on their hands, excited to tell me about Eid. “We stayed up all night,” Neda told me once, grinning.
I remember going back-to-school shopping with them. Their school had given them a long supply list, and we checked each item off, one by one. For every child—folders, binders, glue, pencils. Husna and Neda didn’t want to get too much. They knew we were paying, and they were careful, thoughtful. “Our mom would be mad if we spent too much,” they said, laughing nervously. Still so humble. Not trying to take more than they needed. Always aware. Always respectful.
Once, they showed me a wedding photo album. Pictures of their mother and father. They were so young it made me pause. Their faces still had that softness, untouched by war and resettlement and time. I realized then just how much had changed. How quickly the children had been forced to grow up.
Their father was never in the U.S. He remained in Afghanistan, and his absence hangs in the room when I visit. Not as silence, but as a kind of missing gravity, if that makes sense. The children talk about him sometimes, but carefully, like they’re protecting something. The mother, still so young herself, manages everything alone. School forms. Grocery runs. Rent. Hope. She is one of the most humble people I know. Always kind. Always gracious. Always offering more than she has.
She’s learned English alongside her children, picking up phrases from their homework, practicing greetings with me, holding onto small victories. “Hello, how are you?” she says now when I arrive. And then she returns to the kitchen. To the tea, the cookies, the quiet rhythm of building something stable from scratch.
I began to see how much the girls straddled two worlds. One foot in Houston, the other still planted in the memories of Kabul. They were constantly translating, not just words but themselves. Trying to be American without losing what made them Afghan.
Now, three years later, everything has changed. And also hasn’t.
Neda speaks English with confidence. She’s reading full novels and writing paragraphs that make me pause and reread, surprised by the clarity and beauty of her thoughts. Husna has become her younger siblings’ unofficial tutor. She corrects their grammar mid-sentence. She tells them they can do anything. Their family moved to a different apartment, still in the same complex. Their routines have changed. Their accents have softened. Their ambitions have grown.
I still visit. I still teach. But now, we talk about more than school. We talk about dreams.
Neda wants to become a doctor.
They are daughters and sisters. Survivors and scholars. They are learning a new life, one sentence, one formula, one moment at a time. And in doing so, they’re teaching the rest of us what resilience really looks like.
When I think of them now, I don’t think of trauma or struggle or pain, although those are undeniably part of the story.
I think of their laughter.
I think of their tea.
I think of the way Neda once corrected my grammar, and how proud she was when she did.
And I think about how, in the classroom and beyond, they are not just adjusting to life in America.
They are building it.