My name is Khalid Ahmadzai, and I serve as Senior Director of Partnerships at Canopy NWA. I have been part of Canopy in one way or another since its founding in 2016, beginning with my graduate capstone project and continuing as a full time member of the staff since 2018. What follows is my personal reflection on the five years since the fall of Kabul, and on nearly a decade spent in this field.
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August 15, 2021, stands apart, even against nearly nine years spent working in refugee resettlement, long enough to have watched this field move through cycles of quiet casework interrupted by sudden, overwhelming crisis. That was the day Afghanistan, after twenty years of a fragile and often faltering experiment with democracy, fell back into the hands of the Taliban. For those of us who had spent our lives investing in this experiment, however imperfect it was, the day felt less like an ending than a rupture, one that undid, in a matter of hours, what many Afghans had spent two decades building.
I left Kabul four years before the republic fell, and I have never forgotten how different that departure was from the ones others experienced after the fall. I left by choice. I boarded a plane knowing I could and would return, that the city would still be there, that my leaving was a decision rather than an escape. That is a privilege I have never taken lightly, and one that grew heavier in my mind as the news from home turned first uncertain, then unbearable. When the republic collapsed, so did the future that so many Afghans had spent two decades building. For many, especially those who had worked alongside international forces, aid organizations, or the fragile institutions of the republic, there was no clear path forward at all, only a landscape of narrowing and often bleak options.
I remember that week, and the two that followed it, with a clarity that has not dulled. Kabul airport was plastered on every screen in America: crowds pressed against fencing, families passing children over barricades, a country’s entire recent history condensed into a single frantic image. I had been working in refugee resettlement for almost 4 years then, and what I witnessed from inside that work was something I have thought about every year since – especially during the month of August. Volunteers appeared almost overnight. Donations arrived faster than we could track them. Neighbors we had never met called to ask how they could help, whether they could host a family, if they could drive someone to a doctor’s appointment. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with being inside a crisis: you see everything and understand very little of it in the moment, because there is no time to. You are simply moving. It is only later, once the initial emergency recedes, that the full shape of what happened begins to come into focus. I have spent the last five years trying to see that shape clearly.
We at Canopy NWA resettled more than 250 Afghans in subsequent months, and for many of them, the hardest part of the journey did not end when they landed. Families remain separated even now. I think often of a father who has not held his child in five years, who still wakes up each day believing that reunion is possible, because the alternative is unthinkable. These are not isolated stories. They persist because our government has not yet opened a reliable path for the families of those already here to join them, and they will continue to persist until it does.
And yet, looking back across these five years, gratitude is what remains closest to the surface. I am grateful for a community that did not simply welcome Afghan families in the first frantic weeks and months and then move on, but stayed present through the slower, harder work of resettlement: enrolling children in school, learning a new language, rebuilding a livelihood from nothing. That steadiness has allowed families, and especially the women and girls among them, to imagine futures that were foreclosed to them in Afghanistan.
It helps to understand how rare this kind of welcome truly is. For refugees who cannot safely return home, there are generally three paths available. The first is repatriation, sending people back to the place they fled, an option that in many cases remains genuinely dangerous. The second is local integration, absorbing refugees into a neighboring host country, one that is often already strained by decades of hosting displaced populations of its own. The third, and by far the least common, is resettlement in a third country, the path that brought Afghan families to Northwest Arkansas. Only a small fraction of the world’s refugees, a fraction of one percent, ever receive this option. Most never do.
Since the fall of Kabul, the Afghans who have resettled here have reshaped this community in ways both visible and quiet: in Sakina and Lailuma’s naan, in the warmth of Bek Restaurant in Rogers, in the kitchen at Kabul Chef on Dickson Street, and the soon-to-be-open Afghan restaurant at the NWA Mall. Impact is also visible watching students walking across the stage at high school graduation on their way to college, and in those who have already finished their degrees and are now investing in our communities. It is in the workers filling critical gaps in our workforce, in those keeping goods moving through the supply chain, in the leaders emerging in their respective fields, and in the families who have become homeowners. Each of these is a small, tangible sign of a community that opened its home, its city, and its state, and chose to stand with its new neighbors for the long haul. That, more than any slogan, is what it means to make America great.
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