Sixth Year, Entry Ten - Roshan's Story

Day and Night Have Traded Places

Day 1,841

Eight days after Kabul fell, Roshan applied for his visa.

It was August 23, 2021. The gunfire that had interrupted him dressing for work on the fifteenth had already signaled his old life was over, and the airport crowds had already turned him back. So he did the next right thing available to a methodical man. He filed for his Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), and he believed the wait would be short.

From April 2019 until the fall, Roshan was a trainer on a U.S.-supported program that managed personnel and payroll records for the Afghan security forces. His day started at eight. He moved between the interior and defense ministries, listened to the problems of Afghan administrative staff, carried them to his American supervisors, and taught personnel to enter and manage the records that kept the forces organized and paid. His supervisor answered every call and email on time and treated him as a friend. 

“His kindness,” Roshan said, “is something I will always remember.”

For six months, representatives from military corps across the provinces came to the defense ministry, and Roshan worked beside American military supervisors to hear their problems and move their paper records into the system. At the end of that work, an American colonel presented him a certificate of appreciation.

 "It was a very proud and memorable day for me," he said, "because it showed that my hard work and service had been recognized."

The wait he expected to be short ran four and a half years. His interview came in Islamabad in February, 2026, and it ended in a refusal under the presidential proclamation that has suspended visas for Afghans. He had completed everything asked of him, and the answer was no, for reasons that never considered him.

Roshan now finds himself trapped as he waits. His Pakistani visa has expired, and his passport has too; the only place to renew it is the Afghan embassy. The road there runs through the city that is hunting undocumented Afghans. So he cannot fix the papers whose absence endangers him without exposing himself to the danger. His wife holds the same expired documents. Their daughter is four. She stays inside with them, and she cries because she cannot go to a park and play like other children.

And his clock has turned over.

In his part of Pakistan, police operations run at night, and sometimes the knocking starts after dark, with the men of a household called outside. Roshan lies awake through those hours, listening for the operations, and sleeps in the daytime because the nights leave him exhausted. Day and night have traded places, and both belong to the waiting.

“Support from No One Left Behind means knowing that people understand what Afghan allies sacrificed, and that we have not been forgotten,” Roshan said.

He filed eight days after his world ended. The answer, four and a half years later, was a refusal that had nothing to do with him. Somewhere in his belongings is a certificate signed by an American colonel saying his service mattered. 

"If the United States does not keep its promise to people like us, people in other countries may never again trust the United States enough to work as interpreters, trainers, or partners with American forces."

He is awake tonight, listening at the door, waiting for that promise to come through.

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