Afghans in Limbo.
Last Summer, the world watched in horror as the United States left their 20 year occupation of Afghanistan and the Taliban retreated back into Kabul to take over their country. As Westerners, we saw news clips of terror, panic and humanity that brought us to our knees. Then, a new news cycle began and wiped all this away. What is left is stories of tremendous courage, painstaking changes and thousands of refugees claiming asylum all over the world.
My small glimpse of this begins in Shengjin, Albania in April 2022. Seven whole months after the fall of Kabul. Shengjin is a quaint, seaside town popular with Kosovars and local Albanians looking for a break outside of busy Tirana, Albania’s capital.
I’ve always heard that the way to understand another person’s plight is to “spend a mile in their shoes”. This old addage has been thrown around for decades as a way to empathize with other’s situation, but as I’ve slowly come to see for myself, you simply cannot understand what a lot of people have gone through. But that doesn’t mean you can’t listen - and believe them.
During this documentation work with Afghan Rescue Project, a non-profit founded by US soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, we interviewed about a dozen families (some who wished to have their identities removed from their stories) about how they ended up in Albania of all places. The result is a mash up of educated, impossibly wonderful people and their newfound traumas in a boilling cauldron of agonizing limbo, waiting for their lives to begin again after losing absolutely everything. And I mean everything.
The stories themselves individually are nothing short of insane. No one born in Canada in the past few generations has dealt with anything close to this - in some cases these people have been required to leave entire businesses, cars, homes and even pets behind - on a whim - just to escape the eventual capture by Taliban. In most people’s cases, their families are still stuck in Afghanistan, waiting to be helped out themselves. These people, regardless of their dreadful circumstance are the lucky ones.
In the era of “freedom fighters”, this is what hit me. Is this is where we’re at in our empathetic “walk a mile in their shoes” journey as westerners? We’ve gotten so wrapped up in the news cycle and our own daily bubble that we’ve forgotten that there are people who managed to get out of that authority and into a (albeit peaceful) place to wait for what’s next.