Homeira Qaderi left Afghanistan just before the Taliban took over. But there are many others who still need help.

By Addison Graham

Siawash is one of the most poised and engaging 10-year-olds one will ever encounter. And from the looks of it, he enjoyed his visit to Provo when his mother spoke at BYU’s Kennedy Center last week. But Siawash’s biography begs a curious question: How could so many chaotic experiences be shoehorned into one short decade of existence?

Two and a half years ago, Siawash and his mother, Homeira Qaderi, boarded the last U.S.-bound flight out of Kabul as the Taliban descended on Afghanistan’s capital city in August, 2021. The United States was withdrawing its troops, and though U.S. officials predicted that the Afghan government would collapse in six to 12 months, it only took weeks for the Taliban to gain control of the country.

Siawash and his mother were lucky to get out when they did. But they did not leave unscarred. Even when the Taliban was hiding in the Afghan mountains for 20 years, injustice and inequity abounded in Afghanistan. These two former refugees reminded BYU students, with their presence and their words, of America’s responsibility to help those who have been forced to flee their homelands.

Qaderi had been invited to speak by BYU’s Kennedy Center for International Studies as part of its semester-long lecture series titled “Authoritarianism and Its Discontents.”

Elder Patrick Kearon, who was recently ordained a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, told Latter-day Saints in a 2016 general conference address that caring for refugees is not simply a nice thing to do but a responsibility of Christ’s disciples. Being a refugee does not define a person, Kearon said, but how we respond to a refugee’s plight “will define us.”

Qaderi was a young teen living in Herat, Afghanistan, when the Taliban first took power in 1996. “It took us a whole year to really realize what was going on,” Qaderi said during her visit to BYU. Girls could no longer go to school. The only place where women and girls could gather was in the public bath houses...

https://www.deseret.com/2024/2/10/24064809/afghanistan-refugees-byu-homeira-qaderi