Afghan women raise awareness

By ROBERT STEWART

Sophia Wilcox darts around the room making sure everything’s in place for today’s conference. Her former University of Maryland (UMD) colleagues and some local volunteers are helping out, too.

They’re excited to talk to an audience about the aid program for women they ran in Afghanistan for UMD with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But the April 29 event is bittersweet. 

While a handful of Wilcox’s former Afghan colleagues who have immigrated to the U.S. say they’re lucky to be in College Park for the event, the bulk are stuck overseas. They’re engulfed in a bureaucratic waiting game that has grown dire since the Trump administration suspended the refugee admissions program.

“They were entitled to come to the U.S. by working with us,” Wilcox said. 

Wilcox, now an agricultural development specialist based in Costa Rica, and her former colleagues set up the conference at the Stamp Student Union to raise awareness. They said they want to drive home a point–that there’s still a need to get those they left behind to safety.

The university’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics ran the aid program in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2017.

The Women in Agriculture program trained close to 2,000 women throughout Afghanistan. They learned modern techniques to enhance their gardening skills that would improve food security and health for their local communities.

The program employed staff and interns to help translate, drive, provide logistical support, run the finances and teach the gardening techniques to other women.

When the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan under the Biden administration and that country’s government crumbled, the resurgent Taliban regime targeted people who worked with Western governments. Their targets of retaliation included Afghans who participated in aid efforts like the Women in Agriculture program.

Wilcox, who was the in-country director for the duration of the program, helped collect the paperwork to get the staff and interns to the U.S.–a list of roughly 100 people. She said 30 people have made it so far. 

In the Atrium Room at the university’s student union, Naveen Hashim volunteered at the hot tea station near the doors. 

She has a background in chemistry and policy and was the women’s program coordinator for eastern Afghanistan, helping Wilcox with training and research from Nangarhar province.

“It feels very nice to see them after a long time,” Hashim, who drove hundreds of miles to share her experiences at the conference, said.

“I want people to know our story,” she said. “I don’t want the world to forget us.”

Tamana Mahmoodi, who was an office assistant in Wilcox’s Kabul office, flew from the West Coast to speak at the conference. She said she was happy to be in College Park.

“I missed them,” Mahmoodi said about her colleagues.

The last time most of the women saw each other in person was eight years ago in Afghanistan.

This was Hashim’s and Mahmoodi’s first time in College Park. 

Hashim, Mahmoodi and other Afghan colleagues spoke about the skills they learned from the program, Taliban threats they received, the long process of getting approved to come to the U.S. and the pressing need to get their colleagues to safety.

“They were supporting the same program that we were involved in, and now,” Hashim said, “they’re facing the same threats.”

After the conference they got together to discuss what they can do next to help their colleagues stuck overseas, and they also relished the reunion. Several said they could never have imagined this day. 

“It’s almost unbelievable. Najeeb was my driver in Afghanistan,” Wilcox said, gesturing toward her former driver of six years, “and here I am having him drive me around in College Park.” 

She laughed. 

 “It’s kind of like a funny dream.”