Afghan refugees in Greensboro find their footing and look at other refugee groups for help organizing

Featured photo: Mir Habibullah Akhagar with Dr. Raleigh Bailey, emeritus director, Center for New North Carolinians. (photo by Andrew J. Young)

Life was already chaotic when Mir Habibullah Akhagar and his family arrived in Washington, DC. They were one of hundreds of thousands of Afghan people fleeing the Taliban regime, which took over Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, in Aug. 2021. His family’s evacuation to the US took weeks to coordinate: weeks living in cramped hotel rooms, dodging heavy surveillance and catching long flights to make it to America. Now, they were refugees. 

Akhagar’s family was taken to a hotel, where rooms were reserved specifically for Afghans looking to resettle. They lived there for about a month while he began the formal process of resettlement with the US Office of Refugee and Resettlement, which had set up a makeshift office in the hotel. 

Akhgar already had family living in Texas and North Carolina who emigrated years prior. He hoped he’d get to live near them, but the ORR instead said they could relocate him to North Dakota. 

“It made no sense,” he said. “I was asking, ‘Why are you trying to separate us? I already have family here.’”

Akhgar refused the offer and took resettlement into his own hands. He decided to move in with his sister, who lived in Greensboro. Working as his own case manager, he stayed in contact with the ORR, kept up with appointments, and signed up for the benefits he was eligible for, like Medicaid.

In Greensboro, he found work in clinical testing which came with health insurance. He said he would rather have had a job more in line with his previous public health career, but foreign degrees don’t always translate smoothly in the US job market. 

He also enrolled his kids in one of Guilford County’s  two newcomers schools. The public schools are tailored to the needs of new arrivals, particularly in language attainment. “Sometimes they speak better English than me,” he joked. 

Despite the ongoing challenges of assimilation and resettling, Akhgar considers himself lucky. 

“It was difficult for me even being educated and speaking English,” he said. “But for those people who don’t know English and are not educated, and they don’t have a connection, [resettlement] would be more problematic.”

According to the NC Department of Public Health, about 3,240 people arrived to the state from Afghanistan in the period between September 2021 to June 28, 2024. Most, around 687, now live in Guilford County. (NCDPH noted some Afghan humanitarian parolees arrived independently and not through a resettlement agency like ORR.)

With such a large local influx, it wasn’t difficult for Akhgar to connect with other new Afghan arrivals. He eventually began a WhatsApp group with dozens of Afghan refugees. Over texts, the group has helped each other file for Medicaid, find jobs and housing, translate documents and more. 

But as the group has grown and navigated resettlement, they’ve also recognized that solving their own community’s problems has proven to be a monumental task. 

“They have problems 10 times worse than me,” said Akhagar. “They still can’t find housing, they don’t have access to healthcare or the education system so they can learn English

What they need, according to Akhagar, is to get more organized. To do so, they’re learning from other, more established refugee communities within the city. 

Learning from the past

On Aug. 15, 2021, Akhgar’s life — and the lives of the approximately 4.3 million people who resided in Kabul — changed forever. President Ashraf Ghani fled the capital and the Taliban succeeded in its mission to overthrow the government and American influence. Panic ensued and 1.6 million refugees fled since then, according to UNHCR.  

US military and political intervention displacing millions is nothing new. In 2020, Brown University’s Costs of War project estimated that US interventions due to the “War on Terror” have created about 37 million refugees through 2020. 

The last time the US evacuated and absorbed such a large population of refugees fleeing from the dangerous conditions of their home country was five decades ago, during the Vietnam War. The fall of Saigon in 1975 alone displaced 2 million Vietnamese people, including 125,000 who were resettled in the US. 

Among the Vietnamese nationals who have resettled in the US include the indigenous highland minority, the Montagnard, which translates to “mountain people” in French. The largest population of Montagnards outside of Vietnam, about 5,000, now live in North Carolina. Approximately half of them — and their descendants — call Greensboro home.

About a decade after the first Montagnards resettled in the city, a group came together to form the Montagnard Association Inc., formerly the Montagnard Dega Association. Like the recently displaced Afghan people, the Montagnard people continue to face challenges such as accessing healthcare, searching for housing, finding language and translation services, and more. 

For Andrew Young, a founding member who works as the nonprofit’s technical adviser and grant writer, many of these challenges are because federal institutions and policymakers meant to serve displaced people are stuck in their ways. 

“Both communities face the same problems when interacting with our region’s institutions, which have been slow to recognize changes they need to make in order to effectively respond to these communities’ needs,” Young said. “Our institutions, especially our public ones, are supposed to be learning institutions, able to change and grow.”

Since forming their organization in 1988, the Montagnard community has increased in visibility and reach. The association regularly holds classes in English for speakers of other languages (known as ESOL), cultural heritage and art classes, as well as a slate of workshops for federal student financial aid, job skills and cultural preservation. It’s also created a research network and has been a subcontractor for the NC Department of Health and Human Services. During the pandemic, it worked to provide translated materials about the COVID-19 virus and hosted vaccine drives.

The Montagnard Association is also a designated refugee service provider, and not just for its own people. Because of the association’s high level of organization and official status as a nonprofit, Young says, the organization has since expanded its reach to other refugee populations, particularly those from African and Southeast Asian countries. In the last few years, the organization has worked with the Liberian, Bhutanese, Karenni, Swahili and other communities to build capacity, gain organizational experience, and write grants. 

In the past year or so, it has extended its efforts to Greensboro’s Afghan population, too. 

Shahpeerai Aimaq, an Afghan refugee, now works for the Montagnard Association as a case manager and employment specialist for new Afghan arrivals. She was hired last July. 

Through her newly created position, she has helped or is actively helping 52 people find resources and employment in Greensboro. Those are only the “official” numbers, she explained.

Like Akhagar, she has also had time to ingratiate herself with the newly arrived Afghan community. In various WhatsApp groups of up to 60 or more people, she informally troubleshoots people’s struggles with resettlement. 

“I’m like [Akhagar],” she joked. “I know every Afghan person in Greensboro, too.”

Through both her official and unofficial work, Aimaq sees common struggles like accessing translation services and signing up for federal benefits. But she also has an acute awareness of the specific struggles of her people. She notes addressing mental health — particularly the stress management of primary-income earners — as a huge and largely unaddressed need. 

That’s because the Afghan people’s relationship to healthcare changed drastically after fleeing their home country, according to Akhagar. Before the Taliban, primary healthcare was provided by the government and guaranteed in the country’s constitution. It was also common in Afghanistan for people to simply walk into hospitals and other providers without an appointment. The US has a completely different system. Afghans have to learn to call ahead, schedule an appointment and get themselves to the appointment — and those are just the steps before payment. 

“Here everything is by appointment,” said Akhagar. “That’s the biggest problem for us.”

Bureaucratic ineptitude is another struggle. For one thing, many service providers lack translators for Afghan languages like Pashto and Dari. But one of the worst cases Aimaq has seen was that of a single and divorced mother of three kids, working two jobs. 

“She had nothing. No Medicaid, no food stamps,” Aimaq explained. “Why? Her case manager forgot to sign her up.” 

But there are many things Aimaq has learned from the Montagnard community. She’s seen how nonprofits have the ability to apply for grants and raise funds. She’s seen the research that comes out of having an interested and well-established network of scholars. She’s seen how a community can advance its kids’ educational needs.

“For example, every community can enroll their kids in summer camp. Afghans have no such thing,” she said. “Our kids are at home with no plan.”. 

Since navigating the hiccups in their own resettlement, Akhagar and Aimaq have been building momentum to establish their own official group. And just as they looked to the Montagnard community for lessons in organizing, they’re looking nationwide for inspiration. 

Making the invisible visible 

Little has changed since the refugee resettlement program was created in the 1980s. After initial contact with ORR and relocation, most legal and social services are outsourced to local refugee service offices. 

Though the lack of a streamlined process on a federal level is tedious, delegating cases to smaller and typically more culturally-focused refugee service providers, has its advantages. Today’s refugee populations are more socio-economically diverse than ever. The more eyes on the ground to detect hardships, the better — theoretically. 

In Washington state, for example, the Seattle-based East African Community Services recognizes that the newest and youngest refugees are likely less educated and more impoverished than the generation of regional refugees before them. Their organization focuses on educational enrichment for their youngest refugees while also helping adults find quick employment opportunities.

The nonprofit’s focus on East Africans also makes clear the difference between vastly different regions in Africa. West African immigrants, for example, are more likely to arrive as well-educated international scholars, thanks to federal policies facilitating international student exchange from countries like Nigeria and Ghana. 

Similar organizations also have the advantage of faster data collection. Washington DC’s Southeast Asia Resource Action Center has long advocated for disaggregating data for students lumped into the category of “Asian.” The organization found that the groups they had been servicing — Laotions, Cambodians, Hmong and Vietnamese-Americans — were significantly less likely to pursue higher education than their East Asian counterparts. 

But these efforts are only as good as the federal or state-backed agencies’ decision to see the work and act upon it. 

California’s Medi-Cal expansion to low-income and undocumented immigrants was a decades-long process of activism, county- and city- backed healthcare experiments and localized research. Little by little, with a coalition of agencies and institutions, the needs of a marginalized population were seen. And that’s hard, but not impossible, Young explained. 

“Entities like health providers or local government should not need a community to be formally organized into a nonprofit before they respond,” Young said. “But ultimately, having a formal organization can matter a lot when American institutions — our institutions — feel more comfortable dealing with an official-type group, one with a logo, a letterhead, and recognition by federal and state government.” 

The nationwide and multicultural Power in Numbers campaign, for example, called on the Census Bureau to create more specific demographic descriptors. All kinds of cultural groups came together to support the change,  including one of its major signatories the Afghan-American Community Organization. The national group was created in 2014 to address common challenges, foster cultural ties, and advocate for policies to uplift the Afghan diaspora. 

Thanks to coalitions like Power in Numbers, people of MENA descent — which includes Afghans — will no longer have to be designated as “white.” This will improve the accuracy of the 2030 Census data, which will help inform the needs of communities who rely on federally funded programs like HeadStart, SNAP and Medicare. It was a policy win for Asian Pacific Islanders and MENA alike. 

For now, Akhagar and Aimaq plan on starting small. AACO hosts a big annual conference, but it also hosts community iftars and legal workshops — both things that seem tangible for a small community group. 

“In the future, I plan to have our association to have different committees. We want to have an education committee, we want to have a health committee, culture, housing,” said Akhagar. 

“Everybody has different problems, and maybe then they will reach out to those [leaders] and try to connect the people with the related department.”

Aimaq and Akhagar say they take inspiration from recently arrived Afghan communities nearby as well. In the Raleigh-Durham area, the Afghan Support Center, which is hosted by the U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services, connects refugees with federal agencies but also with mental health providers and local schools for both childhood and adult education. In Alexandria, Va. the nonprofit Women for Afghan Women, provides mental health counseling, legal services, housing and women’s circles and more.

“We’re trying to at least make an organization or union,” Aimaq said. “I cannot say if it’s a big community or any official organizations right now. But at least, we’d like an Afghan community group or Afghan center. I think that will be very good for us.”

On their journey to become more visible, the Montagnard Association will be a handy ally. While federal and state systems can be fickle, Young said they’ll continue to play a supporting role, leveraging their credibility and visibility to spotlight other refugee communities. 

“To see this kind of sharing and support among refugee communities leaves me with a powerful impression about what’s possible when people from so many different backgrounds and cultures are able to work together,” Young said.