Volunteers open donation center for Afghan refugees coming to the Triangle

Faisal Khan was watching the chaotic last-minute evacuations of Afghan refugees out of Kabul airport last month when he started growing “deeply (concerned) and alarmed” about the crisis unfolding there.

The images of people breaching the tarmac, running alongside a U.S. military plane — and some of them latching onto it as it took off — were startling, and heartbreaking, he says.

Just over a week later, as soon as he heard that the Triangle was expected to be one of 19 locations where Afghan refugees would be resettled, Khan, a local civil- and human-rights activist and founder of the Carolina Peace Center, started preparing. He reached out to other organizers and activists, and began coordinating plans to launch a donation drive to collect essential supplies for arriving refugees.

Volunteers began collecting common household goods even before they had secured the space to store them. Elizabeth Parent, a stay-at-home mother who was eager to help however she could, started storing donations in her garage. It quickly filled up.

On Aug. 28, Khan, Parent and other volunteers officially opened a temporary donation center in the ground floor of a Fuquay-Varina warehouse owned by Wray Stephens, whose family operated a hardware store and lumber yard in the building for nearly eight decades before they closed the store in 2013.

On Saturday, one week after they started using the warehouse, volunteers had amassed everything from furniture, including chairs, sofas, dining tables and mattresses, to blankets, cleaning supplies, kitchen utensils and small appliances, and children’s toys.

The donation center, at 405 Broad St., has been accepting goods every day since it opened, and will continue taking donations daily through at least the end of October, Khan said Saturday as he gave a tour of the facility. In addition to coordinating the donation drive, Khan has been meeting with local resettlement agencies to prepare for the arrival of refugees.

Once refugees assigned to those agencies arrive in the Triangle, the agencies will distribute the donated goods that volunteers have been collecting, organizing and storing at the warehouse, Khan said.

The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants is one of multiple resettlement agencies working with Afghan refugees, some of whom have already arrived in the country and in the Triangle.

Omer Omer, director of the agency’s North Carolina field office, said in an interview Saturday the office has the capacity to resettle 25 families, or roughly 100 people, over the coming months. So far, the organization’s North Carolina office has been assigned three Afghan families, which account for eight people among them, but it’s unclear when they’ll arrive in the Triangle, Omer said.

Nearly 30 volunteers showed up at the warehouse on Saturday to help sort and organize donations. At least half were community members who were unaffiliated with Khan’s organization or the other groups working with him, he said.

Seeing multiple people from the surrounding community come out and volunteer their time, or donate their household goods and supplies, is very heartening, Khan said.

“When your intentions are in the right place, doors will open. Good things will come,” Khan said. “A lot of good people will step up and say ‘we can help.’ And that’s all there is, it’s just the will to do it.”

Those who want to make a donation can stop by the donation center any day of the week, and can leave their items with a volunteer, or at the warehouse’s front entrance. The center will again be open and staffed by volunteers on Sunday, Sept. 5.

If you want to coordinate a donation of several items, you can reach out to Khan and the other organizers directly via their Facebook page.

And if you want to donate but are unsure of what to give, organizers have put together an Amazon wish list of items that are most important.