Sabira with Ellie Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation

Humanity First

Elizabeth Titus
Jul 25, 2017 · 5 min read

As I listened to Donald J. Trump’s “America First” inaugural speech on NPR, I was struck by a conversation I had with my Afghan daughter before she departed for a semester in Rome the day before the inauguration. A junior on scholarship at a prestigious liberal arts college in New England, Sabira is doing what most juniors do, going abroad. Keenly aware of how fortunate she is, she left for JFK International Airport in a state of disbelief that this was actually happening. An economics major and Arabic minor, she does nothing but study and earn money as a Residential Advisor, and the result is that she made the Dean’s List for the fall semester.

I should clarify: she is not actually my daughter, as she has loving parents back home in Kabul. I am her legal guardian, and have been for five years, while she is studying in the U.S. Close friends were so taken with her that they are sponsoring her younger sister, Zohra, who goes to boarding school in Connecticut. Other friends in our circle are now making plans to bring her younger brother here, provided the boarding school is as generous with him as they have been with his sister. It seems likely, given the way this family impresses people. A third sister, Nahida, is in the U.S. through a nonprofit devoted to educating Afghan girls, and this past Christmas, all three sisters slept in one queen bed at my home in Connecticut. The head of Zohra’s boarding school said that the sister is an example of sheer determination and hard work for the other students, many of them international. She got all As the past semester, despite the language challenges. And Nahida placed for her Oregon boarding school in a national science competition.

Getting a visa to travel to Italy was not easy for Sabira. The Italian Embassy in New York City wanted a birth certificate, which is unheard of in Afghanistan. Sabira was born in a basement in 1994, without a doctor, and when she was still a toddler the family fled the Taliban and moved to a refugee camp in Pakistan. When the Taliban fell in 2001, they returned to their country. I drove Sabira to the Afghan Consulate in Little Neck, NY just a few weeks before her departure date for Rome. They came up with an inventive way to create a birth certificate for her, using her parents’ national identity cards and affidavits from two Afghan friends living in the U.S. who swore that she was who she said she was. The question was: Would the Italians accept this document, complete with a current photo of Sabira taken at the CVS near the Afghan Consultate? And I could not imagine a more bizarre combination, the Italians and the Afghans, neither noted for reason or efficiency in such matters.

I also wondered, but did not share this with Sabira, whether the Italians were wary of an Afghan woman coming to Italy, given the fact that they have been overwhelmed with refugees. Would they fear that she would seek asylum in Italy? This would not have been unusual, as millions of Afghans have done this. Sabira has relatives in Norway, Australia, Iran, the Netherlands, the U.S. and Germany. Just weeks before she left for Rome, she connected with cousins who had somehow landed in Colorado. Many have been translators for the U.S. in Afghanistan, and their lives became so dangerous that they had to flee.

With her appointment to pick up her visa at the Italian Embassy the morning of her departure for Rome, it was a nail biter of a week. Would she or would she not get to Rome? And if not, how would she get a room at her college and enroll in courses that were closed?

As we prepared for her trip, we went to the Bank of America to get her a credit card. I was shocked by the amount of money she had in her account, several thousand dollars. She managed to do this because of her earnings as a Residential Advisor and her summer earnings. Two summers ago, she worked at a camp for kids with cancer founded by the late Paul Newman. A young woman who had lived in a crowded tent in a hostile environment in Pakistan was now caring for kids with life-threatening illnesses! Last summer, she worked for a nonprofit in Washington, DC.

She called home to tell her family she was about to go to Rome, and I could not imagine what they made of this. They had been to two countries, their own and Pakistan. Her mother was illiterate, while her father had studied engineering in college in Kabul. Following the U.S. arrival after 9–11, the father had several years of a decent income as he worked on road construction for NGOs. In recent years, with the withdrawal of Coalition troops, he worked at low-paying jobs. The total family income was $200 a month, $2,000 a year. With six children, three of them in the U.S., they lived in a home with several generations of family members. The mother did nothing but cook and clean, and Sabira worried about her health. And now, they had agreed to send their son to the U.S. for school. How painful this must be. And yet, how courageous these parents are, willing to sacrifice so their children can get an education. All three sisters plan to return home, believing that it is their generation that can save their war-weary country.

Sabira had told me that with the bitterly cold winters in Kabul, people were left to burn whatever wood they could find, leaving the air thick with pollution. Yet, when several cousins from Ghazni Province arrived, the family welcomed them. Ghazni is one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan, with the Taliban very present and schools closed.

“How can your parents afford to feed more people?” I asked Sabira.

“They find a way,” she replied. “My father told me that since all of you in America are feeding and caring for three of his children, it is the least he can do.”

In the age of America First, this stunned me. Because a group of committed, globally-minded activists for social justice are helping this Afghan man’s children, he decided he had to repay this debt. Not to America. And not really to us. It is a debt to humanity. Indeed, a way of saying, “Humanity First!”

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade