A Celebration of Miracles

And the women behind them.

“An Afghan refugee family is coming to live with us,” Jennie texted me one afternoon.

“Ok,” I replied.

There wasn’t much else to say. She’d been helping coordinate Afghan refugee evacuations out of Kabul to the U.S. and we’d always intended for our house to be used as a hub for things like that. If you know Jennie, it made sense that this would be the next step.

She was pulled into this work when a friend of hers in Kabul asked for help evacuating. With the T*lib*n¹ taking back over, things were changing fast. He had been accused of the heinous crime of advocating for women and helping young people become entrepreneurs. He needed to get out. He’d asked for help getting in touch with a cabinet member of the Biden administration he knew.

How do you get hold of someone like that? I have no idea. When Jennie explained what she was doing, my only thought was that it would take a miracle. Yet Jennie was undaunted. She immediately reached out to her network and got to work. Eventually, she slid right into the DM’s of this person’s spouse and sent a picture of her friend alongside these people at an event in D.C. where he had been honored. Presto, his family was added to a list for transport out. He snuck himself to the airport, got through the gate, onto a flight, and made it safely to the U.S.²

After that, Jennie found herself pulled into Signal chats where she kept working to help other people get out. Not everyone made it. Whenever the T*lib*n intercepted someone, they’d kill them and send gruesome photos as proof to the group chat. It took a massive toll, and Jennie kept saying she was done, but then she’d dive back in.

In typical Jennie fashion, she took on this massive effort late at night as we tended our newborn. Being just a few months postpartum obviously made everything harder, but it also drove her onward. There were so many people that needed help, and so many of them were children, guilty of nothing more than being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then Jennie saw a woman named Hellen, who lived in Anchorage, tweet about a fundraiser for an Afghan family relocating to Alaska. The father of the family was a dual citizen who had lived in America but moved back to Afghanistan after his first wife died. He had been living in Kandahar, but he also had an adult son who lived in Anchorage and was Hellen’s friend. The father had remarried and had six more kids, who ranged from fourteen to just two years old. They were coming to Anchorage to start their lives over and needed a place to stay while they figured out long term housing. Jennie jumped in and offered our house as a soft place for them to land while they figured out what came next.

Hence the one sentence declarative text message I received at the beginning of this story.

A couple weeks later, eight very tired people walked through our door. I’m going to avoid names here, again for safety reasons, but I remember the youngest, not even quite two years old, walking around with wide eyes and a pacifier. Her older brother, around five, clung protectively to his dad. The two middle sisters, around eight and ten, sported defiant poker faces. Then came the two oldest girls, the first about twelve years old, who was quiet and kept her eyes down. Her elder sister, fourteen, stood straight and silently took everything in. It was immediately clear she was the leader, if not in title then at least in spirit. For the purposes of this story, we will call her Meena (after the founder of RAWA). Their dad spoke good English but, of course, no one else spoke a word. Their mom fussed with the youngest while we managed the initial greetings with smiles, nods, and trading names.

The immediate work was to get the kids registered for school, which had already begun, and set them up with Catholic Social Services to begin the hunt for permanent housing. Jennie and Hellen set to these tasks with ferocity. A woman named Andee, a former schoolteacher, knocked on our door and offered to help tutor the kids. The team was formed.

Education in Earnest

Over the next three months, the house became a hub of joyful chaos. We cooked, we played soccer in the yard, and the kids choreographed routines to the craziest Bollywood videos I’ve ever seen. As fall fully gave way to winter and the days got shorter, we started doing movie nights downstairs. Everyone piled on and around our big gray couch with popcorn and pizza.

One night we watched one of the Minions movies and one of the yellow blobs (Bob) points to a rat and says, “poochy.” It’s a micro moment, a complete throw away gag and yet without missing a beat, the kids all turned to one another, nodded, and repeated “poochy” solemnly. I paused the movie and tried to explain that it wasn’t a poochy, it was a rat — and that poochy was just a term of endearment for a dog, not any kind of proper name. How does one who doesn’t speak Pashto do that with a group of kids who don’t speak English? For me, it took putting dignity aside, pointing emphatically to the characters in the paused cartoon while saying the correct terms. I looked insane, but it was important. These kids, like all kids, paid attention. They were smart and wanted to learn. But coming from absolute zero was going to be work.

Jennie and I knew what needed to be done: educate the two oldest girls as fast as possible. After all, they had the least amount of time before a potential high school graduation, they needed to learn the most, and they also represented the foundation of the family’s future stability. Meena was about to walk into ninth grade with almost nothing that would be helpful in an American school: zero English, zero math, zero history, or anything else. Her sister was heading into middle school equipped with the same. Like a fucked-up version of Billy Madison, they had to not only learn the entire curriculum from first grade to high school, but they also had to learn to speak, write, and read English along the way, all while navigating a new culture along the way.

Jennie sat down with Meena and her next youngest sister at our dining room table, a phone translator app open between them, working from English to Pashto and back again trying to establish the baseline of their education before their first day. She showed them on a globe where they’d come from, tracing an arc from Afghanistan to Wisconsin where they’d first entered the U.S., then another up to Alaska. This inspired stunned silence.

I had the bright idea to show them Google Earth. I started by zooming into Kandahar. Their eyes widened. They recognized it immediately, even from above. They pointed and spoke hurriedly. Then I zoomed out from the city to Afghanistan, to the Middle East, and to the entire eastern hemisphere. I rotated the globe almost 180 degrees and started zooming in on Alaska, then Anchorage, then our house. This evoked outright shock. It was one thing to see it on a globe; it was another to be able to zoom in; to realize just how big each of those tiny, brightly colored countries really was, how vast the oceans were, how far they had traveled.

We grabbed my daughter’s kindergarten and first-grade prep books out of her room and flipped through them. Laboriously, through translation, we discovered that they didn’t know the concepts of addition or subtraction, let alone multiplication and division. Jennie showed them shapes and asked a question via the translation app. The girls pointed to a word on the screen, looking confused. Jennie selected it and translated it back to English. It was “triangle.” They hadn’t been taught what a triangle was. Jennie asked Meena, the oldest, if she’d been to school. We learned she’d gone only to the first grade.

Imagine for a moment what it was like to be in their position. Everything they’d ever known had been snatched away from them by the whims of fate. They were in a new part of the world, in their most formative years, not only learning a new language but one that was also read in the opposite direction (left-to-right) with an entirely new alphabet. Meena had no real formal schooling and was being asked to walk into an American high school with zero cultural context. It would take a miracle to pull it off. Most people would fold faster than Superman on laundry day in that situation.

Meena didn’t.

Work.

She and her sister sat down at our table every single day after school and worked with us and Andee. They devoured my daughter’s workbooks in just a few weeks. We bought more at Barnes & Noble, and after a few months, they were through the bulk of elementary school, at least for math and science. Jennie and Hellen had signed the girls up for ESL classes at their schools, where they had a fighting chance to learn to read and catch up to their peers.

As the weeks went by, they started to realize the sheer amount they had to learn. This is the most delicate moment of any undertaking, when the true scope of the challenge ahead becomes clear. You realize all the work you’ve done to that point served only to define the enormity of what is left to do. Instead of making forward progress, the scope of the challenge expands endlessly before you. You feel like you’re treading water as everything you don’t know makes itself known for the first time. Whatever this realization is called,³ it kills everything from home renovations, to startups, to expeditions, to marriages, all the way up to lifelong dreams closely held but never touched. I’ve seen it take the light out of grown men’s eyes more than once. These two teenagers faced it and kept right on pushing.

After a few months, the family moved out to live with their dad’s grown son (the kids’ half-brother). Jennie offered for Meena and her sister to continue to stay at our house during the school week so that they could study at an accelerated pace. The parents agreed, and after school, the girls rode the bus over and we worked until bedtime. Andee came over every afternoon after school to tutor and my mom Beth jumped in, too. Hellen showed up with meals and motivation. We took turns cooking, teaching, getting our own kids ready for bed, doing our jobs, and tutoring in a mad blur every evening. But we found a rhythm, and the girls made progress at an astounding rate.

We kept this up for two years. It was no simple montage, though. As impressive as their progress was, the task of catching up to high school was more impressive still. And we were partially down one team member from January to May: Jennie had agreed to run for State House eight months after they arrived.⁴ This meant she would be in Juneau during the workweek and home on weekends during the spring semester.

So, that spring when it was down to Andee, Beth, and I on the tutoring front while Hellen focused on the remainder of the family and Jennie coordinated from afar. For those two years, I had a front row seat every Monday through Friday to the girls’ transformation. They experienced every emotion from frustration and anger, to confusion, to elation as a concept finally made sense. Sometimes we worked past midnight. Despite that, every morning they were up, packed their own lunches, and made it to the bus. They worked harder than the vast majority of adults I’ve known and complained far less.⁵ It seemed that they, too, understood the stakes.

Side Quests and Scholarship

Like any quest, the path we took wasn’t a straight line. Along the way, we ran into any number of challenges that necessitated side quests, like word problems where they didn’t understand key words, (“what is a carnival? what is a ticket?”). Because of their hard work they understood the math once the equations were setup, but they wanted to know what a carnival and ticket were. This isn’t an issue in and of itself, of course, but extrapolate that moment across the entire breadth of English nouns and I feared we’d run out of time. I found myself saying, “Don’t worry about what a carnival is, we will get back to that, it’s not important, we have like ten more of these to do!”

But they wouldn’t relent, they wanted to understand it all, so we went on regular side quests to search Wikipedia and YouTube for info on things like carnivals and tickets. It was time well spent. Through those side quests, I watched their worlds expand and transform — and it wasn’t always fun things like carnivals. Often, these adventures led us to difficult conversations. When Meena asked me, “What’s the three-fifths compromise?” one day when she was studying history, we embarked on hour long side quest explaining America’s past and how systems of power work which was more sobering than they had prepared for.

There was also the home economics assignment where they were supposed to find a job posting they were qualified for, then find an apartment and build a livable budget. To Meena’s sister, this seemed like an easy task — she could simply work at the grocery store or McDonalds, she declared. But as she started searching the web for an apartment, and saw their prices, she realized that the cost meant she couldn’t afford to buy a new car, or even much of a used one. She’d have to ride the bus. Even then, she still wouldn’t have enough money to travel the world like she planned, and she’d have to cook simple meals every night. She cried for a long time as that reality sunk in.

The education that they were pursuing for its own sake took on a new urgency. They’d thought they had already arrived, by getting to America to pursue the American Dream, the main quest was achieved. But school was teaching them more than just the curriculum; it was opening their eyes to the reality of the world they’d left, and the one they stepped into. It wasn’t enough to get the miracle of escape; they had to understand that their journey was not ending, only beginning. Education for education’s sake is a lovely thing, but unfortunately for us, it is a thing of privilege. Their education also needed to be practical.

It also needed to be paid for. I wasn’t sure how it would happen, but I never spoke of it because I didn’t want to dim their hopes. I remember well getting into my dream school for undergrad and how in a moment my pride turned to pain as I realized I’d never go there. I had been naive about the costs — honestly, I hadn’t even considered them. I thought only about getting good grades, doing well on tests, and writing great essays to get admitted. I assumed the rest would take care of itself. It didn’t. I found a way to pay for school in-state by working through undergrad, and everything turned out fine. But I didn’t know what we’d do for Meena.

She figured it out for herself. Despite participating in every program at school, such as TRIO and National Honor Society, they also started taking classes at the local trade school in addition to their regular workload. Some in business, others in CPR, nursing assistance, and emergency medical training. Meanwhile, they also enrolled in summer school, worked at a local bakery, and sent Jennie emails with her five and ten year goals alongside her detailed plans to achieve them.

Somehow, Meena still found time to apply for dozens of scholarships. She had Jennie and me write letters of recommendation, got more from teachers, and wrote dozens of essays. I remember being proud of her, but thinking it was a long shot. She was going through databases of scholarships online and making applications to each.

Then, she won one: $50,000 per year — enough to cover a bachelor’s degree. Once I was sure it wasn’t a scam (because it feels like more and more everything is a scam) the realization settled in: another miracle. She did what I couldn’t. She found the money and found the way.

Graduation.

This spring I went to the first high school graduation I’ve been to since my own exactly 20 years ago.⁶ I listened to a valedictory speech filled with slang I’ve never heard, but echoing the same themes in every similar speech since time immemorial: Genuine gratitude for friends and fuzzy hopes for the future.

And there in the fifth row sat Meena in her cap and gown, with different colored cords adorning her neck for all of her achievements. Just four years before she stepped off a plane and into an entirely new world. She didn’t know math, or how to read English, or the challenge she was embarking on as her family’s new life began. Now she was graduating summa cum laude. They called her name, she crossed the stage, shook hands, and received her diploma.

This fall she’s applying her scholarship to nursing school, and after that, who knows. She dreams of being a midwife, maybe eventually going to medical school, and one day being able to return to Afghanistan and open a hospital for women and children. No matter what, she will always be a genuine, walking, talking, living miracle. In a world where those are increasingly scarce, I think that’s worth celebrating.

1. Purposeful to prevent unwanted SEO attention.

2. Last we heard he was doing well, we had dinner with him in 2022.

3. Does this have a name? Please tell me, if so! If not, let’s come up with one.

4. The girls were there when she filed to run, and at the results party when she won. They even flew to Juneau and worked as pages on the House floor for a day, where Jennie told their story. They had the entire chamber on their feet, many crying, and received the longest standing ovation one long serving member said he had ever seen.

5. Including the ones I love dearly and worked side-by-side with 14 hours a day, 7-days a week for years building launch pads. Yes, they could put many a Pad Rat to shame.

6. God that’s a hard number to write. But according to the emails in my inbox, we have a reunion for the class of 2005 this summer.