Every third Thursday evening, an episcopal church in upstate New York transforms into an Afghan takeaway restaurant. It’s a “very foodie congregation”, says the Rev Marcella Gillis. The church does not charge the fledgling catering company overseen by Saida Faqirzada, a refugee from Kabul, for use of its gleaming commercial kitchen.
That decision, unsurprisingly, reminds Gillis of a familiar biblical parable. Several bystanders pass by a distressed person who has been mugged, who beaten up, robbed and left for dead. They say, “I’m not allowed to help them. I shouldn’t help them. Someone else will help them.” So they walk past.
“The person who eventually stops is a Samaritan, someone from Samaria, who in the context of the story would have been an outsider, sort of an untouchable. And they’re the one who stops. Gets them clothes. Gets them housed. Gets help for them.”
Welcome to Stone Ridge, where a group of modern-day good Samaritans have adopted two families of Afghan refugees who arrived in this country, like so many immigrants before them, with little more than hope.
A few years ago, Faqirzada faced threats from the Taliban. She had served as director of the Women’s Business Resource Center, an Afghan NGO funded by the United States government that promoted female entrepreneurship. It was early 2021, and while the Taliban had yet to seize power throughout the country, they already terrorized Kabul with bombings and assassinations.
“I was always exposed on the TV and doing interviews, advocacy for businesswomen,” said Faqirzada, 32. In a church hall, she sits next to her hijab-wearing mother, who requested anonymity because she also held a controversial job, working in the Afghan government promoting women’s rights.
“I started receiving calls, threatening calls, threatening messages,” Faqirzada recalled. Fearing for her life, she fled to the United Arab Emirates in June 2021, leaving her parents, two younger brothers and her then eight-year-old sister behind. “I was crying in Dubai,” she said. “Am I stuck here? Am I going to see my family again?”
In August 2021, the Taliban routed the US-backed Afghan army, which disintegrated in days. That December, Faqirzada’s family crossed the crowded Torkham border with Pakistan. They waited in the cold on a line that moved an estimated 20ft in two days. Taliban border guards, she said, “beat people with like a pipe or a wooden stick”.
Faqirzada’s father, who asked not to be identified, usually lets his multilingual eldest daughter do the talking because he is still learning English. But when asked what would happen if his family returned to Afghanistan, he volunteered a one-word answer in English: “finished”.
But at a time when support for immigration is waning – Gallup recently found that 55% of Americans want to restrict immigration compared with 33% in 1965 – the family is thriving thanks to the Afghan Circle of the Hudson Valley.
The informal group of volunteers include a clinical social worker, a former state department official, an educational consultant and a professor, who speaks fluent Dari, one of Afghanistan’s most common languages.
The Faqirzada family, who are in the United States legally, arrived here with just some clothing and family photos. The circle provided many services and companionship. “They were always here with my family,” said Faqirzada. “If it was a good thing, if it was a bad thing, if it was my sister’s birthday, if it was like a celebration or anything, the next day, they were just knocking the door.”
Similar initiatives have emerged in recent years. Jesuit Refugee Service launched the Migrant Accompaniment Network to provide kinship to newly arrived refugees in several states. “The program is a lifeline to arriving families,” said the non-profit’s president, Kelly Ryan. “But our volunteers tell us they get at least as much out of their work as do those we serve. They see the immense good that comes from human kindness and following the biblical directive to welcome the stranger.”
The story behind this mobilization is a testament to the power of the press. Harv Hilowitz, an author and grant writer, wrote a letter to the editor in the Kingston Freeman newspaper in December 2021 urging a “monumental patriotic and humanitarian effort” to resettle the US’s displaced allies.
At the time, many Afghans lived on US military bases, some in tents. His community, Hilowitz wrote, “has the capacity to welcome and resettle at least one Afghan refugee family here, if not 100 families”.
The call to action inspired Susan Sprachman, 77, and her husband, Paul, 77, who had both served in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan from 1969 to 1971. “We said, ‘Aha! This is exactly what we’d like to do,’” said Sprachman, 77, a retired social policy researcher who became co-chair of the circle.
Sprachman, who wore dangly beaded red earrings that she just picked up in Bhutan, was sitting in the couple’s 1795 farmhouse with wide plank floors covered by Persian rugs. Her husband, she said proudly, was “one of the leading experts on off-color Persian literature”.
In small towns like Stone Ridge, news and gossip travel fast. “People were calling and asking what they could do to help out,” said Sprachman, whose grandparents came to the US from Russia and Poland. Some people donated winter clothing. Many gave cash. The Sprachmans’ neighbor down the road offered to rent the circle a largely empty two-bedroom apartment, which acquaintances, new and old, filled with furniture and household goods like pots and pans.
Haddad’s Middle Eastern Groceries in Poughkeepsie, New York, about 30 miles away, provided some familiar foods for free.
“We busted our butts,” said Susan Griss, 74, an educational consultant and member of the circle whose ancestors came to the US from Poland, Russia, Austria and England. She focused on stocking the homes with various supplies and coordinated with food banks to feed the families. “Never underestimate what neighbors can do for neighbors,” she added.
Through the resettlement grapevine, the circle heard about an Afghan couple in their 30s on the brink of homelessness in California. “They were going to be out on the street,” said Sprachman. “We arranged an Uber to take them to a motel, arranged with the motel to charge the room on a credit card and … then got them airline tickets to fly here.” The couple soon referred the Faqirzadas to the circle.
Once the two families reached New York in the spring of 2022 (Saida Faqirzada reunited with her family earlier this year) more offers of aid came in. A doctor treated the families for free until they could obtain health insurance. An orthodontist discounted the cost of braces for Faqirzada’s young sister. Pro-bono lawyers filed asylum applications. A car dealer gave the family a used sedan and a mechanic agreed to cover the cost of labor for repairs if the circle paid for parts.
Access to a car is critical in the Hudson Valley; public transportation is limited. Paul Sprachman, whose people are from eastern Europe, dug up a driver’s manual published in Dari. The Afghan refugees used it to learn the rules of the road. Paul then contacted the Ulster county clerk at the time, Nina Postupack (who has since died), with a request to conduct the learner’s permit exam orally in Dari. That accommodation required approval from New York state’s department of motor vehicles, which granted the request.
Occasionally, the New Yorkers and the Afghans navigated cultural bumps in the road. Paul Sprachman pointed out that Afghans routinely welcome guests with a meal. “Getting them to understand that that’s not expected here has been, yeah, a little tricky. Suddenly, there’ll be a table full of food, and you’re expected to eat – a lot.” He also monitors what he says around the family. “Hospitality is the pillar of the culture,” he explained. “If you say, ‘that’s a beautiful watch.’ They demand that you have to have it. You have to practice compliment avoidance.” (Full disclosure: Faqirzada’s father, a painter, insisted that a visiting reporter who asked to look at his artwork accept two small watercolors as gifts).
Gary Jacobson, a social worker and co-chair of the circle, likened the outpouring of support for his new neighbors to “watching a beautiful dance unfold on stage”. He estimates that he once spent up to 40 hours a week advising the Afghan families. He has also counseled other refugees as a psychotherapist. While the Afghans in Stone Ridge have encountered generosity rather than bigotry, Jacobson frets about growing anti-immigrant rhetoric in America and warns that it harms vulnerable people. “It is easy to blame the newcomer, the less-fortunate and those from other cultures,” he said. Refugees “have fear and other emotions related to being displaced, witnessing and experiencing other trauma, and being thrown into a world where they have little standing”.
Jacobson is continuing a charitable tradition started by his parents. In 1976, they rented an empty New York City apartment, where Jacobson’s late Russian-born grandfather had lived, at a below-market rate to a refugee resettlement agency. A Jewish family that had escaped the Soviet Union moved in.
Jacobson referenced his heritage in a fundraising letter for the circle. “In Hebrew,” he wrote, “the word ‘Chai’, means ‘life’ and connotes hope. Each Hebrew letter has a numerical value. The letters in Chai add up to 18. Thus in my faith it is common to give gifts in multiples of $18. I trust that you can afford an $18 donation.”
Several of the circle’s leaders are Jewish, which initially surprised Faqirzada. “We never thought that non-Muslims will welcome a Muslim refugee,” she said during a second interview at her apartment over green tea, plates of almonds and Hersey’s chocolates. “But the way that they did, my mom appreciates that. My father appreciates that. My whole family, they are grateful.”
Jacobson returns that sentiment. He told the Afghans when they profusely thanked him: “You gave us the opportunity to experience something we’d otherwise would never have – to truly help people. We are very happy you decided to trust us and get on that airplane to NYC. Thank you. You owe us nothing. Your success, however you measure it, is our reward.”
The Faqirzada family have traveled far on the road to independence, prompting the circle to wind down its operations. Saida Faqirzada found two jobs and runs her companies. She’s the food service manager at a nearby hospital and also works in the administration at a local community college (she just proctored three exams). She had yet to master driving – “I had drivers” in Afghanistan, she acknowledged – so family members give her rides to and from work.
Her companies, Ariana Pro Services, a cleaning service with residential and corporate clients, and Ariana Feasts, the catering business, borrow branding from the ancient name for Afghanistan as well as the pop singer Ariana Grande. “I’m going to just put Ariana on every other business that I might start,” said Faqirzada.
The monthly “Afghan Ariana Feast” at Christ the King church arguably rivals firehouse pancake breakfasts on local social calendars. “There are a lot of people that build their third Thursday of the month around this and plan dinner parties,” said Susan Sprachman.
The family’s youngest daughter, now 12 and in middle school, checks in guests as they pick up meals ordered online. “Our sister,” said Faqirzada, “is one of the luckiest, she didn’t have to spend more than two, three months [ruled by] the Taliban”, which has banned women from receiving a secondary education. “She has the chance to go to a school and pursue her dreams.”
And they are big, if shifting, dreams: one day she wants to become a lawyer like her mother, and other days she envisions being a pilot. Her parents, said Faqirzada, want all their children to “pursue our dreams here that we couldn’t do in our country”.
David Wallis, whose Polish-born mother came to England as a refugee in 1939, is co-editor of Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World’s Richest Nation (Haymarket).
