Using a trauma-informed approach to gathering stories, this unique collection of 19 stories illuminates the range of challenges and successes met by the latest generation of displaced peoples from Afghanistan.
When American troops pulled out of Afghanistan in August 2021 and the Taliban returned to power, the lives of families were radically disrupted. Large, loving, vibrant families that had gone about their daily lives were suddenly separated, and many youth were forced to flee.
The storytellers, ages fifteen to twenty, come from various ethnic groups: Pashtun, Hazara, Tajik, and Pashai. While the future of Afghanistan and its youth in the United States is still uncertain, these first-person stories illuminate the harrowing contours of the unjust displacement these young people experienced. Their narratives bear witness to the early days of their resettlement.
Green Card Voices and its partners from Afghanistan carefully collected first-person accounts of the diverse journeys of nineteen young men and eleven young women on their path to resettling in Minnesota. These stories were gathered at the speed of trust using a mix of handwritten essays and oral storytelling in English, Dari, Farsi, and Pashto. My City Was a Sparkling Jewel: Voices of Newcomer Youth from Afghanistan shares the challenges faced, opportunities grasped, and dreams these youth had, and still have, for themselves, and for the families and friends they left behind.
Dr. Rozman was born and raised in Yugoslavia. She was in high school when the country began to break up resulting in decades of wars and unrest. As a teen, she began working in the refugee camps for Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) people. In 1997, she moved to the US after receiving the George Soros-Open Society Institute's scholarship to study at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. In 2004, she received Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship and Graduate Assistantship at the New York University where she obtained her M.A. in Near and Middle Eastern Studies. In 2005 she returned home, and enrolled in the Ph.D. program in the field of Cultural History, specializing in oral history at the University of Nova Gorica. Her Ph.D. thesis focused on the oral history collection, which included the accounts of the Bosniak survivors of the Srebrenica genocide of 1995, as well as the Dutch UN peacekeepers who tried to protect them.
In 2012, Dr. Rozman moved to Minneapolis, MN and months later co-founded Green Card Voices, an organization that combats stereotypes by empowering immigrants to tell their stories. Using the oral history methodology she and her team recorded and shared the stories of over 500 immigrants and refugees coming from 150 countries and living in Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, New York, California and Georgia. She is the editor of ten books―most award-winning collections of first-person immigrant stories. Dr Rozman is committed to trauma-informed work, empowerment of immigrants and refugees, creating brave spaces, social entrepreneurship and immigrant leadership. She is the 2015-2017 Archibald and Edyth Bush Fellow, and 2022-2023 Oral History Association and National Endowment for Humanities Fellow.
Dr. Lotfi was born in Afghanistan, raised in Iran, and returned to Afghanistan in 2010. She was a professor of Afghanistan History at the University of Kabul, specializing in Iranian and Afghan history. She moved to the US in 2016 after her family obtained a Special Immigrant Visa for Afghans - a visa for people who were employed by/on behalf of the U.S. Government. Since then she, her husband and two daughters have called Boston, MA their home. As of January 2022, Dr. Lotfi is a proud new US citizen. Dr. Lotfi’s Ph.D. dissertation entitled “The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan: From Inception to Political Supremacy, 1919-1978” focused on examining the progression of the political transition in the middle of the 20th century. In the academic year 2018-2019, she was a visiting scholar at Northeastern University where she delivered a public presentation called “An Increase in Honor Crime in Afghanistan.” In 2018, she was awarded a travel grant from Boston University to further investigate the representation and roles of women in 18th and 19th-century Afghan historical texts.
Dr. Lotfi’s most current project is “The Massacre of Hazaras in Mazar-e- Sharif by the Taliban in 1998.” This oral history collection includes the individual accounts of the survivors of that horrific event many refer to as the Hazara genocide. Her hope is that documenting the untold stories of the witnesses of the massacre of Mazar-e- Sharif will amplify the voices of the Hazara people, who have been directly impacted by ethnic and religious injustice in Afghanistan since 1893.
Jeannine Erickson is Washington born and Minnesota raised writer, forever educator and the Program Manager at Green Card Voices. She graduated from the St. Catherine University with a Double Major in Critical Studies of Race and Ethnicity and French. She identifies as a Biracial Black Woman and a Transracial Adoptee with extensive experience in public speaking, facilitation, intentional community building, and quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. She is a Black-American/Decendant of Enslaved Africans individual with over three plus years of nonprofit, organizing, and programming experience.
During her time with her former nonprofit 826 MSP, Jeannine worked on two publishing projects: Words Unburden Me and Rehumanize Me. For Words Unburden Me, she and other 826 staff and volunteers partnered with three classes of ninth-grade English Language Learners at South High during the 2019-20 school year. Together they worked with students to think and write about themes of identity, family, heritage, and language. Students explored pressing issues such as gun violence, racism, immigration, historical trauma, and much more. In Rehumanize Me- an anthology of poems, essays, and other creative works by 14 young Black authors from Minneapolis - Jeannine worked closely with our young authors, some who she had known since first starting in the role, to publish this piece de resistance and 826 MSP’s first racially/ethnically specific youth anthology.
Zahira is the creative mind behind Rasm Print Creations. A mother of two, an artist, a business owner and a visionary. The word “rasm” in Dari (one of the official languages of Afghanistan) translates to “draw” because she hand draws everything and Afghanistan is her motherland.
