Everybody was shocked about how fast everything happened. Everything they had worked for in the past 20 years just disappeared overnight. They lost their country, their investments, their home, their lives. Emotional anxiety and stress were at an all-time high. They were traumatized and completely devastated. The first thing they would say was, we lived through hell and that’s how we made it here. From there they would be sent to different military bases. On the immediate response: I had been on the ground at the Expo Center since day one when the first evacuation flights started to arrive for the initial processing of the refugees. “You could definitely see the trauma that they’d been through on their faces.” I spoke with Abbasi over the phone about why this work feels personal to her, and how she has witnessed the Afghan diaspora mobilizing to help those whose experiences they understand only too well. “The thing that stuck with me the most was hearing their stories and basically experiencing their trauma, because it was so raw and so real,” she says.
One girl told Abbasi she couldn’t sleep because she still heard the sound of gunshots at night. Many had only come with the clothes on their backs and hadn’t showered in more than a week. Some were US citizens or green card holders while others had pending petitions for a Special Immigrant Visa available for Afghans who worked with the US government. Over several days, Abbasi estimates she spoke with and provided some type of legal assistance to more than 100 people who had entered the country with various legal statuses. As the first evacuation flights landed on US soil in late July and early August, she decided to volunteer at the Expo processing center for Afghan evacuees outside Dulles International Airport in Virginia. When she was six years old she and her family fled Afghanistan, which had descended into a civil war following the end of Soviet occupation in 1989, and came to the United States. Things were just changing by the moment over there.”Ībbasi knows what it’s like to have to rebuild a life elsewhere. “Everyone was calling frantic,” she recalls. The Afghan-born immigration attorney who lives and works in a Virginia suburb of Washington, DC, was barraged by phone calls from desperate relatives hoping to leave the country amidst the Taliban takeover, as well as from Afghans in the United States eager to help their loved ones. The days and weeks leading up to and following the tumultuous withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan were chaos for Sharifa Abbasi.
#Dulles expo center afghan refugees volunteer free
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