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Cousins Ariane Mahmud-Ghazi (at left) and Sadaf Rassoul Cameron hope Santa Fe's deep ties to Afghanistan can play a role in helping new refugees.
The United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan unfolds less than three weeks before the 20-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the US that spurred the deployment into the country.
But for two Santa Fe women with close familial and historical ties to Afghanistan, the events transpiring there today evoke lifelong trauma, as well as hope for a different path forward.
Sadaf Rassoul Cameron, co-founder and executive director of the Santa Fe-based Kindle Project, was born in Santa Fe in 1979 and grew up here after her mother fled the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1978.
“I faced my own hardships here, growing up half American,” Cameron says, “but it’s important to remember we’ve been living with this for decades. It’s not like Kabul fell a week ago and everyone’s hysterical. This is part of my identity. I feel it in my bones.”
The Kindle Project just launched an Afghanistan fund to provide support to organizations working with artists, artisans, women and girls who are either at risk inside Afghanistan or have managed to relocate outside of the country. The fund has been limited to minimum donations of $5,000 to try to reach a $250,000 goal as soon as possible.
“I invite the wealthy in Santa Fe to give to the people of Afghanistan,” Cameron says. “This is an opportunity to move from collector and appreciator of cultural diversity to investor in long-term community healing, which will benefit all of us locally and globally. This is an opportunity to move from the paralysis of helplessness to tangible action.”
While she hasn’t been inside Afghanistan, Cameron’s work as a photographer has included documenting border Afghan refugee camps and the survivors of the 1947 partition in both India and Pakistan. Her first trip, when she was 21, was with her mother, who made her living in Santa Fe as a merchant. “She was up at the flea market hustling goods, back and forth between here and Afghanistan; Santa Fe was a community that met her with open arms,” Cameron says. More recently, she visited Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan with a consortium of funders connected to her foundation.
Her cousin, Ariane Mahmud-Ghazi, a somatic psychotherapist, clinical social worker and trauma consultant, has a private practice in Santa Fe and has worked in Afghanistan with a number of organizations. While she was born in the US (Washington, DC), her father was posted as an attaché to the Afghan embassy, where she spent her first four or five years. She first visited the country as an adult in 2002 a few months after the fall of the Taliban and stayed there about three weeks, a trip she describes as emotional. “I was so shaken by that trip that I came back here, shifted my work and went into the trauma work to sustain myself and pass it forward with other people,” she says. She then returned for several consecutive years starting in 2007 to provide “staff trainings in trauma first aid, self-care and reflective supervision.”
Both women also are cousins with Mahbouba Seraj, a well-known activist in Afghanistan for women, and director of the Afghan Women Skills Development Center, who also is a former Santa Fe resident. Seraj spoke with the Washington Post on Aug. 24 about her decision to stay in Afghanistan amid chaos and strife. “I don’t want to go back to the United States and I want to see what I can do for the people of this country,” Seraj, 73, says. “If everybody leaves, what is going to happen to Afghanistan?”
A “long and windy road” brought Mahmud-Ghazi to Santa Fe, but both she and Cameron say the city’s connections to Afghanistan run deep, connecting both to “hippies” who visited Afghanistan in the 1970s during treks across Europe and India, as well to the mercantile and trading community here.
“People are drawn here because of the similarity of the high desert and these colors,” Mahmud-Ghazi says, “this landscape.”
They both hope to see Santa Fe serve as a landing place for some Afghan refugees—an idea that has surfaced many times over the years—which they say has the potential to provide an environment that is both supportive and familiar.
That was the case for Cameron’s mother, she says. “The landscape was helpful…for her own PTSD and trauma. I know for my mother it had a profound impact…something about the landscape that made her feel like she was home.”
Last week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and House Speaker Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, wrote a letter to President Joe Biden offering the state as a resource for resettlement: “We have a proud tradition of welcoming refugees from around the world with open arms, and we make no exception for the people of Afghanistan,” the letter reads. “We are glad to remain in contact with your administration on the evolving plans for settlement of these vulnerable populations, and we will await further direction from your administration as to how we may be able to support those efforts.” ABC News also reported this week that the US is adding Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo as a fifth domestic military base to house refugees.
In the immediate future, however, both Cameron and Mahmud-Ghazi are focused on to help keep people safe. The new fund from Kindle Project, Cameron says, has security as its immediate priority, while simultaneously aligning with the foundation’s core mission. “We’re looking at artists, we’re looking at artisans, women and children…it feels like they are the people that will be targeted first and on the front lines,” Cameron says. Information on the Kindle Project’s Afghanistan fund, as well as several organizations provided by Mahmud-Ghazi, are available at the end of this story.
As for the long term, both Cameron and Mahmud-Ghazi also see in the current crisis the possibility of a different future.
“I think it’s a call for a greater understanding of how we relate to the world,” Mahmud-Ghazi says, “The governments have failed us—both the Afghan government and the American government in terms of the exit—but the people-to-people connection remains…the understanding of what’s important in life: your children, your kin, your community, your love for your country. Even though what’s happening is happening, there’s an opportunity for us to come together to determine what values we wish to live by.”
That will involve “a generation of work,” Cameron says. “It’s a major undertaking for the diaspora, and something I’m here to show up for.”
How to help
The Kindle Project Afghanistan Fund
Kindle Project donation information:
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service
Afghan Journalists Safety Committee (donate via their U.S. nonprofit Partners online)
