We were an unlikely pair. I was an American writer, peace activist and grandmother. Mansoor was a 21-year-old single man wanted by the Taliban in his home country of Afghanistan. But over 14 months, communicating only through email, text messages and occasional phone and FaceTime calls, our lives would become entwined in ways neither of us could have imagined.
By Susan Perretti
It began in August 2021. The Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic regime that was toppled 20 years earlier during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, had just re-seized power following the withdrawal of US troops there. Among the tens of thousands of Afghans now in peril was a group of altruistic young activists that called themselves peace volunteers. For years they had been working to create a “green, equal and nonviolent” world without war, all from within a nation that had known only war for decades. The group has since disbanded and asks not to be named, for security reasons. Dozens of the former volunteers fled to Pakistan.
I belonged to an ad-hoc committee of internationals, many of whom had visited and formed friendships with these Afghans over the years. After the Taliban regained control of the country, the peace volunteers’ idealism and programs promoting unity among tribal Afghanistan’s historically divided ethnicities and championing women’s rights – as well as its close ties with Westerners – placed them at risk. Our committee started meeting online to explore how we might get them out of Afghanistan and resettled into safe countries.
Mansoor, one of those volunteers, was on the first zoom call I joined. Polite and engaging, he explained in amazingly good English that he had gone into hiding in Kabul to evade capture by Talibs seeking to enforce a death order issued against him for teaching Afghan girls and preparing them for university. The Taliban forbids females from attending school past the sixth grade.
The day the Taliban swept Kabul, Mansoor met with his students for the last time in the private educational center he established in 2018, attended what would be his final class at the university where he was studying medicine, and dove underground. Taliban fighters had already come looking for him at his school and family home.
Our committee had created a “buddy” system pairing Westerners with vulnerable Afghans, and after that initial meeting I volunteered to be Mansoor’s buddy. I had no real idea of what that would entail; it was a spur-of-the-moment decision of the heart that I somehow trusted. I had long protested the war in Afghanistan, as well as other resource wars in the region. During a 2010 global phone call, I met some of the Afghan peace activists for the first time.
Gathered around a cell phone in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, during that call the peace volunteers spoke of their efforts to transcend barriers that keep people apart, including ethnic, cultural and religious ones. I was amazed at the maturity of these (at that time only) boys who grew up in poverty and war. When I expressed despair over how little my fellow Americans seemed to care about ordinary Afghans, one of the boys admonished me not to give up on peace. “We the Afghan youth will persevere so you must not lose heart,” he said through a translator.
I would remember those words often during my journey with Mansoor, who joined the peace group a few years after my phone call with them. Meeting the volunteers brought the war in Afghanistan much closer to me. It had acquired names and faces and voices. Now those extraordinary young people were in trouble and I had the chance to help one of them.
Following our first meeting on Zoom in August 2021, I texted Mansoor and he responded quickly despite the 8.5-hour time difference between Kabul and Setauket, New York, where I live. Over the next year, we remained in daily contact. And while separated by some 7,400 miles, it felt like I was journeying alongside him, that we were experiencing together his flight to freedom, including his escape from Afghanistan, his harrowing trip across the border, his life as a refugee, and finally, last October, the happy news that Canada had granted his request to immigrate there.
One message, one photo at a time, I learned Mansoor’s remarkable story of resourcefulness and determination. He was four years old when Talibs murdered his oldest brother and tortured his father because they were Hazara, a long-persecuted Shia ethnic minority in Afghanistan. His father was beaten so severely that he became disabled and could no longer work. Mansoor helped support the family by washing cars and selling cigarettes and chewing gum in Kabul city as a “street kid,” later working as a mechanic’s assistant and apartment complex cleaner, all while going to school.
At 12, he studied English in a US Embassy project for poor teens and three years later began teaching child laborers in the youth peace group’s free “street kids” school. Weeks after graduating high school, Mansoor opened his own educational center, naming it Zaryab (“to find gold” in Persian), because for him education was as precious as gold. Soon, helping girls gain entrance to universities became his priority.
After a 2018 spate of suicide bombings in Kabul targeting private schools with Hazara female students, Mansoor closed Zaryab temporarily and devised a reopening plan with enhanced security measures. Zaryab wasn’t attacked but the Taliban ordered Mansoor to stop teaching girls or be executed. He considered fleeing Afghanistan then, but US troops were still there and he felt safe enough to stay. Also, he wanted to set an example for his students by showing them he would not let adversity destroy his dream of becoming a medical doctor.
A week after Mansoor and I met, he texted me a short video he had recorded moments before outside the Kabul home where he was hiding. I was horrified to recognize the sound of guns. I texted back frantically, “Are you okay???” The seconds it took him to respond felt agonizingly long. “Taliban are firing outside and I cannot sleep,” he answered. The graveness of his situation and my powerlessness to protect him were sobering. Whatever romantic notion I had had about “saving” a poor Afghan kid was suddenly overthrown; this would be far more than a feel-good exercise. Already I had come to care deeply for Mansoor, and I realized then how swiftly, how senselessly, I could lose him. But remembering again the words of the young peace volunteer years earlier, I told Mansoor that I would not give up, and he had vowed the same, and that was that.
With the committee’s help, we designed a route for Mansoor to travel from Kabul to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border crossing in Spin Boldak. On September 7 – 4 p.m. his time, 7 a.m. mine – he boarded a bus to Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban and the Pashtun people. He wrote: “I am on the bus but I can’t talk to you because the Taliban say speaking English is a sin. But I am going to text you.”
Almost 12 hours passed before he wrote again: “I am in Kandahar. It is 3:30 in the morning and I have to wait till sunrise after that I will go to the border.” I pictured this young man who had never been outside Kabul by himself in a strange city in the dark of night. “Are you okay?” I typed. “I am sitting on a street corner,” he replied. “Don’t worry.” Throughout his journey he would say that often, but I always worried.
The following day, I messaged him: “How are you??” Nothing. About 90 minutes later, he wrote, “Let me give you good news. I am in Quetta, Pakistan. I crossed the border today!” Sobbing with relief, I texted, “I am crying joyful tears!” supplanting my words with a row of red emoji hearts. I’d never used emojis before, but Mansoor liked them and they helped convey at-times complex feelings within brief messages. “Me too,” Mansoor answered, including his own string of emoji hearts. “It was very hard but I didn’t give up.” “That’s my boy,” I wrote back.
In Pakistan, Mansoor would have more close calls while at my Long Island home I searched for a third country that would grant him asylum and permanent residency. In the city of Narowal, he was picked up by police. Without a Pakistan visa or legal status (a situation many of our Afghan friends have faced at one time), he could easily have been deported, but his Pakistani cousin got him released. Having begged him to keep a low profile, I was dismayed to learn he had told the police about his flight to freedom. His outgoing nature was hard to suppress, but in time I came to trust his street-smart instincts which were almost always spot on.
A few weeks into his journey, Mansoor asked if he could call me “Mom.” Separated from his own mother for the first time, he needed all the nurturing he could get, and I was willing, though my own children were much older than Mansoor, my eldest grandchild only eight years his junior. I asked him how to say “my dear son” in Persian. He responded, “bachim jan.” To this day, that’s how I address him. He calls my husband, Chuck, his “American Dad.”
Whenever I feared he would never be admitted to a safe third country, Mansoor would tell me, Inshallah (if Allah wills it). His Muslim faith gave him confidence that things would work out. Over the course of the 13 months he was in Pakistan, we celebrated (virtually) his 23rd and 24th – and my 68th and 69th – birthdays. When I learned my daughter-in-law was expecting a child, I told Mansoor he would be “the Afghan uncle.” His response? “Ohhhhhh what a great news! I love it Mom jan!”
There were other ordinary times as well, everyday conversations beginning with “Hello, are you there?” or “What did you cook for dinner?” On early morning calls to Pakistan, I often heard the watchman’s whistle signaling all was well around midnight Mansoor’s time. My kitchen clock sounding a different bird call every hour was a source of delight for Mansoor. “Your birds, Mom!” he would enthuse when that happened while we were talking.
The joy we shared helped us surmount the hurdles we encountered, including spotty Wi-Fi, dropped calls, electricity outages, floods, an earthquake and political unrest in Pakistan. In March 2022, Talibs jailed Mansoor’s younger brother in Kabul for fighting with a boy who was trying to steal his phone; they demanded 93,000 afghanis, roughly 1,060 US dollars, to free him. It was an obvious ploy to shake down impoverished Afghans, but by then his family had become my family so I wired funds that friends on Long Island had donated toward Mansoor’s support.
Mansoor and I hailed from different religious traditions, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. We were generations apart in age, continents apart in geographical miles. And yet in those months we journeyed together we discovered how much we had in common, such as faith in a God we called by differing names. Through Mansoor I gained a deeper understanding of Muslim observances and holidays such as Ramadan and Eid al-Adha. From afar we celebrated the Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter with e-cards and texted well- wishes.
Twice during his ordeal, Mansoor jeopardized his own safety to help strangers. In Islamabad it was the injured street kid he took to the hospital. “But he is poor and looking in garbages,” he explained when I chided him for taking chances. That day I appreciated more fully Mansoor’s capacity to care. He had entered my life when I was particularly distressed by the lack of civility and kindness in my country’s political discourse. But Mansoor’s ready compassion restored my faith in an inherent human response to suffering. Tending to Mansoor, who was a stranger on my path, my own heart widened, creating space to love still another person.
October 27th marks one year since Mansoor arrived in Canada. Along with his Canadian sponsors, Chuck and I met him at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport that night. Dressed in jeans, sneakers and a black jacket, he was the only Afghan on the red eye flight wearing Western attire. As the weary travelers entered the waiting area, I recognized Mansoor from his photos, dropped what I was holding and ran to hug him. The other Afghans looked perplexed. Who was this Westerner displaying such unbridled affection? If they had asked, I would have told them, I am his American mom.
I’m happy to report that Mansoor is thriving in Toronto, where he resumed his medical studies this fall at the University of Toronto. We still text or talk regularly. He hopes to visit New York soon. When he arrives, we’ll throw him a party, inviting friends who are eager to meet him. He promises to prepare us an Afghan meal. Inshallah. Inshallah.
Call for support and cooperation
I knew little of immigration matters, of things like wiring money internationally, crossing land borders or securing travel visas. I relied on my more experienced committee colleagues for direction when guiding Mansoor. During our bi-weekly meetings, we compared notes, researched countries willing to accept the Afghans, and identified possible funding sources to support our friends’ journeys to freedom.
The generosity of many individuals, religious orders, and charitable foundations has enabled us so far to resettle 40 of our friends, some with families, in Portugal, Germany, Brazil, Canada and the Netherlands.
Drawing from our successes, we are now working with a coalition of groups in Spain on a plan to enable 25 Afghans to reach the northern province of Galicia. To date, we have raised enough funds to satisfy the “surety” required by the government of Spain which averages $9,000 per person for one year. However, the actual cost for this project will be much more, so our fundraising efforts continue. We are appealing to individuals and groups for further assistance. We estimate we will need a total of $341,000 USD (or $13,000 USD per person) to cover airfare and one year of expenses for all 25 travelers.
Contributions to assist our friends hoping to resettle in Spain may be sent to our fiscal sponsor, the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute. Checks made payable to the “AJ Muste Memorial Institute” (please write “Yaran” on the memo line) can be mailed to:
AJ Muste Memorial Institute at 55 Exchange Place, Suite 405, NY, NY 10005. The link for online donations is: https://ajmuste.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=36
