NH wraps its arms around Afghan evacuees
May 29—Cooking, it turns out, is a universal language.
On a warm late-spring afternoon, a dozen women are gathered in a church basement to prepare a meal. They chop vegetables for a colorful salad and set a pot simmering with chicken and aromatic spices.
These are some of Manchester's newest residents — evacuees from Afghanistan who fled when the Taliban took over their homeland — and the neighbors who are making them feel welcome here.
The American and Afghan women may not share a language, but they exchange plenty of smiles, gestures and laughter as they work side by side. In the next room, children chatter happily as they explore a large bin of toys.
The International Institute of New England in Manchester is one of two resettlement agencies helping Afghan evacuees resettle in New Hampshire. Members of its staff give them English lessons, help them find jobs and housing and provide legal assistance.
IINE also relies heavily on volunteers, including groups from local churches, to help make this place feel like home for the newcomers. The volunteers help set up their apartments with donated furniture, drive them to medical appointments and shopping and teach conversation classes.
This is not charity, the volunteers insist: It's the least we can do.
"I view this as what these people deserve," said Hansi Dean, a volunteer who drives from her home in western Massachusetts every week to help the Afghans settling here.
"They fought alongside the U.S. military and they fought the Taliban, and it's our responsibility to make sure that they have community and self-sufficiency."
There's a deep sense of connection with the Afghan people after 20 years of shared war. "We really owe them this," said Susan Bochinski, a volunteer from Grace Episcopal Church who is part of the cooking group.
Imagine what these people have been through, said Calley Milne, one of the organizers of the support effort at Brookside Congregational Church. They fled their homeland, she said, packed into cargo planes, their children on their laps, with only the clothing on their backs, an unimaginable ordeal.
"The only reason you would do it is if you're scared for your life," Milne said. "You arrive here with no luggage, no clothing ... and you've left your livelihood and your family behind."
Working together
The community response has been overwhelming, Milne said. It's an organic effort: services growing out of need, resources moving from those who can provide to those who need a helping hand.
"Instead of helping in our own silos, we came together and said what can we do together," Milne said.
"We live in a community that is a city, but small enough that we have an incredible ability to mobilize quickly," she said. "And we're able to make good things happen in short order."
For instance, when they discovered that the women were all expert seamstresses, they put out a call on social media for donations of sewing machines. In short order, "Every woman got a sewing machine," Milne said.
One man told the volunteers that he's a musician, so Milne posted a request for an acoustic guitar. One arrived the next day.
Queen City Bike Collective joined the effort, donating bikes to help people get around the city. A used-car dealer offered help finding reliable cars; a mechanic offered car repair services. Others have helped connect Afghan families with jobs, schools, even a soccer league for the young boys.
And retired teachers are hosting "conversation circles" for the newcomers to practice their skills.
Making connections
Local churches and the Greater Manchester Clergy Association have been deeply involved in the resettlement effort, but Milne said it's not confined to any particular religion. "This is about faith in people, and a greater good that we all have within us if we're willing and able to act on it," she said.
Early on, the evacuees were living in hotels, where they formed a sort of community. But as the families moved out into apartments, they found themselves more isolated.
That's when someone had the idea to bring the women together once a week to cook meals at the church. It's "a taste of home," Milne said.
It's also a chance for the women to socialize. Friendly volunteers keep an eye on their kids so the women can catch up. At the end of the day, they divide up the food they prepare into family-size portions, which are delivered to all the Afghan households.
This is about building community, Dean said. "Everything isn't just addressing basic needs, but it's trying to create some opportunities for people to socialize," she said. "And what we hear from the women is it's a break from their tears.
"Because every minute of every day and every night, they're worried about their family back home," she said.
The New Hampshire women who participate in the weekly cooking sessions said language is not a barrier to friendship.
"You just point and things get done," said Denise Forest of Auburn, a Brookside parishioner.
Forest said she's been deeply touched by these warm-hearted people. "One of the things that really struck me was the joy they all have after everything they've been through," she said.
Terry Heinzmann said when she learned that Manchester would be receiving Afghan evacuees, she felt compelled to help. "I can't sit here and do nothing," she remembers thinking.
"I put myself in these people's place," Heinzmann said. "It's got to be the worst thing in the world to be torn away from everything you know."
Giving back
Nancy-Ann Feren chairs the outreach committee at Manchester's Grace Episcopal Church, which early on got involved in supporting the IINE's resettlement efforts. It started with donating supermarket gift cards and quickly evolved into more personal connections.
Feren retired from teaching in 2007. She and some other retired teachers began meeting with some of the Afghan families who were living in hotels after they arrived in Manchester. She also became friends with a family of Sudanese refugees who were living in the same hotel.
The conversation circles have continued now that the families have moved into apartments. They work on conversational skills, using everything from flash cards to supermarket flyers and children's books.
"It's extremely rewarding," Feren said. "It's doing what you know how to do in a different setting."
One of her most enthusiastic recruits is Kenneth Grinnell, a retired organist and longtime parishioner with an extensive background in theology and music. He started out delivering meals and is now teaching English to five Afghan men every morning.
Caring for his new Afghan friends is the highest expression of his Christian faith, Grinnell said.
"We're all humans on the planet and the one thing we can do is take care of each other," he said.
On one visit, some of the children were eager to show Grinnell that they were learning their ABCs at school. A former children's choir director, he taught them the Alphabet Song.
In turn, they stole his heart, he said.
Hansi Dean said after two years of pandemic, "I just felt like I needed to do something with people who cared about other people."
"I think that the response to the COVID pandemic, and the response to challenges in our country is to help each other, not to argue with each other," Dean said.
"We love working with each other and we love spending time with our new Afghan neighbors," she said. "They're the most hospitable people."
One time, she had arranged for an installer to set up WiFi service for a family, and another volunteer stopped by to see how it was going. "There was the cable guy sitting on the couch drinking tea and eating snacks like an honored guest," she said, laughing. "He was so delighted."
Getting out
While some families managed to leave Afghanistan together, other evacuees are men who had to escape quickly, leaving parents, wives and children behind when the Taliban swept into power.
Staff from the IINE recently gave an update on how the resettlement efforts are going. Among the speakers was Noorulhuda Quraishi, an Afghan evacuee.
Quraishi, who has degrees in economics and journalism, was working with the U.S. government as an adviser, he said. He also was a journalist and activist, helping poor and disabled individuals in his homeland. But when the Taliban swept into power last August, he said, "Everything changed within 24 hours."
"The situation was out of control," he said. "There was no way to get my family with myself and protect them."
A bulletproof car drove him to the airport in Kabul, where he got on a flight to Germany. He wound up at a military base in Wisconsin, where he spent four months before coming to New Hampshire. On base, he volunteered to help with the thousands of other evacuees, teaching English and cultural orientation.
He is now working as an education program assistant for IINE. He worries about his family members back home, who have to move frequently to stay safe, but he said he's grateful for the opportunities he has here.
"I cannot express how much I am happy here and how much I am safe here," he said. "Being safe in life is really important."
Volunteers said the benefits go both ways.
"No matter what you do, you get more out of it than you give," said Chris Stevens, a volunteer from Grace Episcopal.
"Just being able to help somebody become an active part of our community, being able to help them integrate, is just so rewarding," Feren said.
"It is what we can do as a community together that's making a difference," Milne said. "And we are a better community for it."
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For more information, including volunteer opportunities, visit: iine.org/get-involved.
