Seeking a New Home

Most mornings, as she made her way to class or a lab, the tree greeted Saieda. Tall and stately, its branches shaded a walking path at the University of Delaware.

It became her habit to pause, just for a minute, under its canopy. The tree had been there yesterday, it was there today, and it would be there tomorrow and the day after that. Its permanence comforted Saieda; it grounded her. “It brings me hope,” she said, “that in many ways tomorrow can be better.”

Saieda’s life had been upended by the turmoil in her home country, Afghanistan. Two years earlier, in August 2021, the Taliban swept into Kabul, seizing control of the government and pledging a return to a conservative strain of Islam, one that, among its other tenets, has opposed the education of women and girls.

Amid the chaos, Saieda was among 148 female college students to escape the country on an American military transport plane. They hopscotched from Qatar to Spain to just outside Washington, D.C., finally landing at a military base in rural Wisconsin with thousands of other Afghan evacuees. After American colleges rallied to support them, Saieda and 14 others ended up somewhere none of them had heard of, Delaware.

For Saieda and other students’ safety, The Chronicle is not using their full names.

Now Saieda was on the university’s leafy campus in Newark, trying to put down roots. Stopping at the tree became a sort of daily meditation. Although others didn’t linger, she liked to imagine how many more Delaware students passed by its furrowed trunk. The thought gave her a sense of community, of connection in a strange place. “I feel alive,” she said.

Studying in America had been a dream for Saieda, a top student who excels in science and math. But it wasn’t her plan two years ago as the Taliban advanced on Kabul.

Instead, she and her fellow students were supposed to go to Bangladesh, to the Asian University for Women, an institution with a mission to educate women from across Asia, regardless of finances or background, in the liberal arts. On the day the first Taliban fighters entered the city, Saieda, who had won a scholarship to the university, also known as AUW, was supposed to get her visa.

For Kamal Ahmad, a Harvard-trained lawyer and AUW’s founder, evacuating students and alumnae became an increasingly urgent mission. With commercial air traffic grounded, he called in favors, trying to charter a plane and expedite travel documents for all the students.

Their eventual escape was harrowing. Shrouded in burqas so as not to attract attention, the AUW students boarded buses. For days, they tried to reach Kabul’s main airport, which was controlled by American and other western forces, but were turned back by fighting, unfriendly guards, or throngs of others trying to flee.

One bus was hit by gunfire. A suicide bomber detonated his explosives in a crowd close enough for students to see the flames, killing 200. Desperate families tried to break down the buses’ doors to board.

On the fifth day, they made it through military checkpoints and onto the airport grounds. When the transport plane took off from Kabul, the students, sitting together on the floor of its hold, had no idea where they’d land.

Half a world away, Scott Stevens, the longtime director of the University of Delaware’s English-language institute, read about the students’ story in The Chronicle and had an immediate instinct to help. Within hours, the university’s senior leaders had agreed to accept a group of students. Stevens also spread the idea to other colleges with programs that offer English-language instruction.

The English-language aspect was key. While AUW’s language of instruction is English and upper-level students can hold sophisticated discussions about literature, history, and economics, few Afghan students are fluent in English. Like most AUW students, they spend at least a year in a pre-college program that combines college-preparatory work with English instruction.

Although the response from American colleges was swift — 10 institutions, including Arizona State, Brown, and Cornell, accepted Afghan students — it would be months before most students set foot on a college campus. The evacuation of roughly 53,000 Afghans was the largest such airlift since the Vietnam War, and immigration processing and medical checks slowed resettlement efforts.

Each night, Saieda and her classmates waited for officials at Fort McCoy, the Wisconsin base that had become a refugee site, to announce the groups that were leaving and when they were going to Delaware. Having a place to go made them luckier than many on the base, she knew, but it was hard not to feel anxious.

As fall slipped toward winter, Delaware administrators sent them welcome videos and offered online English classes. The students also became teachers while on the base, volunteering to instruct children in the alphabet and acting as translators for families who had even less English-language skills. “We had so much free time,” Saieda said, “it was good for us to be busy.”

Finally, in December it was their turn to leave.

Accompanying Saieda to Delaware was an old friend, Zahra. The pair had met as schoolgirls, and had studied English and applied to AUW together. Now their relationship had deepened. “She is my family, and I am her family,” Zahra said.

Zahra had hugged tearful goodbyes to her own family as she boarded the bus for the Kabul airport. Her mother had pushed her to go, for her safety, for her future. Now she fretted about those she had left behind. “Instead of thinking about what is going to happen to me, I am worried about my family,” she said.

She looked to Saieda for support. “Whenever I am sad, I will go to her, and when she is sad, she comes to me.”

For Stevens and his staff at the English-language institute, the most-difficult challenge was to figure out how to meet the emotional and social needs of a group of students displaced by war. The academic side, they had down. But these students were not typical of the many who had attended the institute over the past four decades.

The Afghan students had experienced a profound trauma, and now they were on their own in a strange country, uncertain when they would be reunited with family and friends. Some worried that their decision to leave Afghanistan for an education could put their loved ones at risk. “Virtually all of them have PTSD,” Stevens said.

Each student processed that trauma in her own way, and their individual outlooks could shift from day to day. Sometimes the stress would keep Saieda up and she’d take walks in the night. Zahra tried not to dwell too much on the past and busied herself with schoolwork and activities. But attempting to do that occasionally brought her up short. “Sometimes I think, how is it that I’m adjusting OK?” she said. “Maybe I am a person who is good at forgetting.”

A cultural stigma among many Afghans against mental-health treatment made helping them more difficult. Naledi Gordy, who was then a caseworker with Jewish Family Services of Delaware, the local refugee-resettlement agency, and worked with the students during their first months at the university, would from time to time try to nudge them to consider therapy. “No, I’m not crazy,” they would reply.

One student agreed to schedule an appointment, only to back out after she read boilerplate language on intake forms that mentioned psychosis. “She said, no way,” Gordy said. “So close, yet so far away.”

Yet, for all that the students have been through, “they have the greatest resilience of anyone I’ve ever seen,” she said. “You can cry with them, but you can laugh with them, too.”

On many afternoons, music would fill the halls of the English-language center, courtesy of an informal guitar club. Students plucked American standards like “You Are My Sunshine” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and played traditional Afghan melodies on guitars donated by the music department. “They didn’t even care if they were out of tune,” said Ross Fenske, an adviser and academic-development specialist who organized the group.

Saieda and Zahra joined the volleyball club, where their serves and volleys grew sharper under the guidance of Ken Cranker, an assistant professor who coaches on the side. The university police department offered the students a course in self-defense.

The activities were part of robust services set up by the language center to support the students, including individualized tutoring and special workshops on issues like time management. The center arranged for host families to take in small groups, thinking that the students would be more comfortable in a home environment. Rebecca Boyle, the center’s student life manager, stepped in to coordinate their programming, aiding them with matters big and small, from setting up bank accounts and decoding bus schedules to waiting in the recovery room after one had an appendectomy.

On call 24/7, Boyle grew “fiercely protective” of the Afghan students. “I’m holding on to them like a mother with a toddler,” she said.

Indeed, Boyle sometimes looked like a mother duck with 15 teenage and 20-something ducklings in tow. Together, they visited Washington, D.C., and the state capitol in Dover, went to museums and botanic gardens and a shopping mall.

Campus groups and local leaders clamored to meet them, and Boyle and Stevens tried to be judicious with the invitations they accepted: They didn’t want the students to feel on display. “I don’t want them to become the poster children for displaced students,” Stevens said.

Yet cultivating public support was necessary to raise the funds needed to support the women’s education, in the language institute and then on toward an undergraduate degree.

One late May day, the students crowded into a stately colonial-style house that is home to the Biden Institute, a university public-policy center named for President Biden, a Delaware graduate. There, they were greeted by Valerie Biden Owens, the president’s sister and former campaign manager and the Biden Institute’s chair. At her prompting, the students nervously took turns introducing themselves and their interests: Physiology. Entrepreneurship. Engineering. “I am undecided on my major,” one student, Rabia, said, “but I want to do great things like you did.”

“This is really amazing,” Biden Owens told the group. “You are so brave. You are so courageous.”

At the end of the first summer, Zahra and Saieda were among four Afghan students who had completed their English study and could begin regular college courses. The staff at the English-language institute threw a surprise party to celebrate.

Matriculation was just the latest step forward. With two other roommates, they had moved into an apartment, taking the bus to Aldi and making dinner together. One day, returning from class on her new bike, Zahra was caught in a sudden cloudburst and in a minute, she was soaked. The rain pelting her face, she felt happy. “It was a good memory,” she said.

They had been through so much, but for both women, the prospect of starting undergraduate coursework was daunting. If the English-language center had been a cocoon, safe and warm, they wanted back in. “You’re supposed to go into a class with 200 people,” Saieda said. “Where do you fit?”

Saieda had always known that engineering fit her. One day when she was young, her father, who worked in construction, had come home with a special gift, a fancy briefcase like those carried by engineers. The Taliban has projected to the outside world an image of Afghanistan as a place that is hostile toward education, especially for girls and women, but Saieda’s parents encouraged her academic goals. “My dad would call me ‘Engineer,’” she said.

Suddenly, though, subjects that had come easily to her were a struggle, as she tried to keep up with the volume of new material and information, all in English. Zahra, too, was in trouble, especially after she decided to switch her major, from engineering to computer science. That meant that more than three weeks into the semester, she had to change classes, putting her further behind. Sometimes she’d study for hours, thinking she had mastered all the material, only to sit for a test and have the questions swim before her eyes, incomprehensible.

Zahra had also grown up academically inclined, in a family that celebrated her intelligence. As a young teenager, she began to think about how she could win a scholarship to study abroad. Even as explosions became more frequent in the city, she continued to go to school.

She was quick to say that she wasn’t exceptional in pursuing education. Prior to the Taliban takeover, girls were among the recent high-school graduates across Afghanistan who would sit each year for the national college-entrance exam, and it wasn’t uncommon to see students heading for study centers at 5 or 6 a.m. “Everyone was so eager to gain knowledge,” Zahra said.

These days she kept in touch with a group of high-school friends with a once-a-month call. Several others were also in the United States, a few were in Bangladesh, a couple in Canada, one at a university in China. But a handful were still in Afghanistan, their studies, and their lives, on hold.

Her family had managed to leave the country and was living in Iran, a relief. But she felt anguished about her friends at home. Had the Taliban not come, they, too, would be in college. “I’m happy for myself,” she said, “but sad for the other students.”

Saieda also felt the weight of her good fortune, of the opportunity she had been given. “It’s not just responsibility, it’s hope,” she said. “I am the hope for my family, my community.”

Not wanting to waste that opportunity, she asked for help. Both Saieda and Zahra became regulars at office hours, turning to professors, teaching assistants, tutors, and even classmates when they felt confused or fell behind. Their grades rebounded.

They also found that, counterintuitively, the answer wasn’t just to study more but to put their books down and take part in activities on campus. Saieda joined the university’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders, working on a water pump to help Malawian villagers access groundwater.

Zahra became treasurer of the Sky Club, which promotes well-being and mental health, hosting retreats and weekly guided-meditation sessions. In the spring, the group won a campus-leadership award as the best new student organization.

They gravitated most of all to the volleyball net. Each Friday, they spent a couple of hours running drills and playing a game or two against other students, women and men. When Cranker, the English-language professor and coach, left in the fall for his regular two-month leave, Saieda and Zahra kept the club going. “What a delight it is,” he said, “to teach people who are motivated like that.”

As the months progressed, Cranker and other staff members at the institute could see the changes in the Afghan students. Some were surface-level. Zahra and Saieda had always worn western clothes, but other women shed their conservative dress. Their hair showed; they wore makeup sometimes.

Other changes were deeper but still perceptible. The students carried themselves with greater confidence. “They’ve realized they can do it academically,” Stevens, the center director, said.

Still, many still saw the institute as a sort of home base. Some, like Saieda, took jobs there, helping with paperwork and orientation sessions. When one student was asked to speak at an event in New York, she turned to Cranker, who coached her over Zoom to get her pronunciation just right. “It’s unusual to have these ongoing relationships” with students who move on to college, he said, “not just when they need a reference letter.”

By this summer, their second in Delaware, the final student in the group was ready to move on to regular university courses. Stevens’ staff worked with academic advisers in different colleges and with the student-life office to ensure a smooth transition.

The university’s decision to take in the students “began with an emotional response,” he said. “That’s a good place to start, the heart, but it’s not enough. They need intricate levels of support.”

Over the summer, Saieda and Zahra were invited to take part in a women’s leadership seminar. They heard from guest lecturers from politics, volunteer groups, and NGOs and took field trips, including to the United Nations headquarters, in New York.

Saieda was most impressed by the “brilliance” of the other workshop participants, who came from Africa. “They were sure,” she said. “They were there with a purpose,” to develop plans to benefit their home country, through farming, environment stewardship, and even fashion.

What could the Afghan women do? The Taliban had banned girls and women from going to school or college beyond the sixth grade. What about virtual classes to allow them to continue their education online?

The students continued to feel the burden of responsibility. “The reason I am here is not a coincidence,” Zahra said. “First I should help myself become independent, then help society and help my home country.”

In many ways, they were between worlds: No longer the shellshocked newcomers who arrived with only their cellphones and the clothes they wore, they also stood apart from other students at the university, where less than 4 percent of undergraduates come from outside the United States. They were moving on, but still tethered to Afghanistan.

That feeling of limbo is thanks in large part to their legal status. Like the majority of the Afghan students on the airlift, they were still waiting to be granted asylum, caught in an immigration backlog.

More minor things can make them feel different, too, like the bus. While Zahra looked out the window or talked with her friends, other riders were silent, staring at their phones. “I don’t want to be a person always at the computer,” she said.

The sense of separateness was most acute during school breaks, when the campus was left empty and still. Last Thanksgiving, Amanda Bullough, an associate professor of management who led women’s leadership efforts, invited the Afghan students for dinner. At times, though, America could feel like a lonely place.

But now, after summer break, the campus was filling back up, as students arrived for the start of the fall semester. Greeting the incoming students was Saieda, who had been named a welcome ambassador, one of the upperclassmen who assist with orientation. She’d applied for the position because she knew what it felt like to be a stranger, tentative and new — and the importance of being embraced by a community. She felt like she could pass on what she’d been given.

When she left campus these days, even just for a brief trip, Saieda found that she missed the place and the people there. “This is a new experience, a different culture, a new environment,” she said, “but it feels like home.”