Sixth Year, Entry Five - Jalil's Story

Homework for America

Day 1,832

Every day in Pakistan, Jalil does his homework for a country that has not yet let him in.

He attends a language course, two hours with the travel there and back. When he is at home, he teaches his wife English for an hour because their newborn keeps her from attending a course herself. He takes his four-year-old for a walk, sometimes to the park near the house.

He helps with the housework, studies his lessons in the evenings, and reads other books when the lessons are done. It is the schedule of a man preparing for a promised life, kept up daily, on faith.

From late 2018 until August 15, 2021, Jalil worked in IT support on a Ministry of Defense network project backed by the United States, in the Herat zone. His last day of work was the last day of the Republic. 

"We carried out our work with complete honesty," he said, "and then suddenly everything changed." 

From Herat, there was no way to reach any airport in those weeks. The family left home carrying the documents for their visa case and nothing else. When his phone broke and erased every photograph of his working years, four documents surviving in his email became the archive his case rests on.

He expected the visa to take three or four months. 

"We thought everyone knew that the lives of people who had worked for the United States were in danger and that they would move us out in the shortest possible time." Years on, with visa issuance for Afghans suspended, his case receives an occasional update. "They say keep waiting. Nothing else has changed."

But the waiting can be costly. If he falls ill, even the road to a hospital is dangerous, since police can arrest a man whose Pakistani visa cannot be renewed. When his second son was born in December, he didn’t dare  accompany his wife to the hospital, and when the cold came, they wrapped the baby in their own coats at night. This summer the heat gave his four-year-old nosebleeds, and with nothing to spare for a doctor, Jalil nursed him on home remedies under a doctor friend's guidance until a former colleague living nearby helped him buy a battery and a cooler. 

The stranded are holding each other up while they wait for the country that promised to. People waiting in Pakistan are enduring the hardest conditions he knows. 

"There is no work to keep us occupied and put a piece of bread on the table, and there is no safety that would let us be at peace in ourselves."

Jalil reflects on the bonds he felt with his American counterparts during the war. "We too were among your co-workers; we were counted as your friends. Do not leave us alone in these conditions. The Taliban, as you know, were and remain the enemy of all of us, you and us both."

Then he goes back to his lessons. The course meets again tomorrow.

Support allies like Jalil as they wait for the promise to be fulfilled: https://give.nooneleft.org/campaign/831559/donate