Here is a lovely Thanksgiving eve story of America welcoming foreigners to her shores. It comes from a woman in MInnesota who worked for years with agricultural specialists in Afghanistan:
The university-educated Afghans helped turn land in an overgrazed, drought-stricken and impoverished region in eastern Afghanistan into verdant gardens and orchards that still feed local families today.
In the process, the 12 agricultural specialists, all traditional Afghan men, formed a deep, unexpected bond with their boss, an American woman who worked as a U.S. Department of Agriculture adviser in the region for two years.
Now Caroline Clarin is trying to save them one by one, doing it all from the 1910 Minnesota farmhouse she shares with her wife, drawing from retirement funds to help a group of men who share her love of farming.
It’s a great story. Read the whole thing if you can. This gay woman farmer lives in the heart of Trump country and she’s helping Afghan refugees settle in the US. Here’s just one of their stories:
Patan arrived in Minnesota with saffron, Afghan almonds, and 5 kilos (11 pounds) of Afghan green tea to share. He also gave Clarin and her wife, Sheril Raymond, seeds of Afghanistan’s tender leeks for their garden.
He was the first member to join Clarin’s team after she was sent to Paktika province. A confident, young university graduate, Patan spelled out what was needed in the region. It would become the basis of her program: Seeds, trees and the skills to plant gardens and orchards.
Patan considers Clarin and her wife family. His three sons and daughter call them their “aunties.”
In fact, he’s decided to live in nearby Fergus Falls, a town of 14,000, instead of moving to a larger city with an Afghan transplant community.
Surrounded by farmland stretching to the North Dakota border, the town’s skyline is dominated by grain elevators and the spires of Bethlehem Lutheran Church, a reflection of the region’s Scandinavian roots.
The only other Afghan family in town is his cousin’s. Sami Massoodi, who has a degree in livestock management, also worked for Clarin’s team in Afghanistan and arrived in 2017. He and his family lived on their farm before they got established in Fergus Falls.
“In Fergus Falls, they have really good people, really friendly people,” Patan said as he drives his minivan down the tree-lined streets to pick up his 5-year-old daughter at a Head Start program.
It is a place where neighbors pay unannounced visits to say “hi” and people greet the postmaster by name. It is also staunchly Republican. Fergus Falls is the county seat of Otter Tail County, which voted twice for former President Donald Trump.
But people in town say friendships and family take precedence over political views, and there is broad empathy for the struggle of immigrants since many people’s parents, grandparents or great grandparents came from Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
Only months after they arrived, the Patan family already feels at home in large part because of Raymond.
She helped enroll their kids in school, find a dentist for 9-year-old Sala’s infected tooth, and sign Patan up for car insurance, something that was new for the 35-year-old.
She lined up English classes and state and federal services for new immigrants. She drove Patan an hour to the nearest testing site for a driver’s license. After he failed twice because his English was not proficient enough, he asked if there was a test in his native Pashto language, like in Virginia and California. There wasn’t. So Raymond found a site, another hour away, that would allow him to review his errors. On his third try, he passed.
Clarin has tracked down a sheep on craigslist for Eid, while Raymond watched YouTube videos on how to slaughter livestock according to halal principles, since the closest halal butcher is an hour away in Fargo, North Dakota.
For Patan, they have been a comfort in a strange place.
“When we are going to their house, we feel like we went to Afghanistan and we are going to meet our close relatives,” he said.
He longs for his homeland, the family festivities. Patan’s wife makes their traditional dishes still, like Bolani Afghani, a fried, vegetable-filled flatbread that Clarin enjoyed with him in Afghanistan.
Over there, Patan and her team were the ones helping her feel at home.
It was the longest she and Raymond had been apart since they started dating in 1988.
Raymond, who cares for the chickens, pigs and other animals on their farm, would do video calls often, staying online even after Clarin had fallen asleep.
Two years after Clarin returned, they married in August 2013 when same-sex marriage became legal in Minnesota.
Homosexuality is still widely seen as taboo and indecent in Afghanistan, where same-sex relations are illegal.
Yet, none of the Afghan families have asked about their marriage or expressed judgment, the couple said.
Patan calls them his “sisters.”
“We have a lot of respect for them,” he said.
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Both Clarin and Patan speak passionately about farming, describing in detail how to get a good apple crop and ward off disease.
Clarin arranged for the U.S. military to take her team in convoys to remote areas to train farmers, empowering Afghans to teach each other skills. They lined canals to ensure clean water. They worked with farmers to plant trees and build stone barriers to control flooding. They distributed seeds to 1,200 families, who have since shared seeds with more people.
The program trained about 5,000 farmers in Paktika from 2009 to 2011. They provided growers hoop-houses, apple trees, pruning equipment and small grants. They taught farmers tangible solutions, including using buckets with drip lines to irrigate gardens and conserve water.
The Taliban tried to sabotage the trust they built with farmers, Clarin said. Once, an explosive blew up in a red bucket like the ones they used for irrigation.
Patan has stayed in contact with some of the farmers in Paktika and proudly shows photos on his iPhone of the tiny stems he distributed that are now trees several feet tall. One farmer texted him to say his harvest is feeding his family as millions of others in the country face severe hunger.
That offers some solace after seeing his homeland fall to the Taliban. It feels good he said to know his work left something lasting and that “the people can still benefit from it. We educated one generation and those fathers will tell it to their sons.”
Patan misses his career back in Afghanistan. Most U.S. employers do not recognize degrees from Afghan universities so he plans to return to school to earn a U.S. degree. For now, he is training to be a commercial truck driver, a field flush with opportunities: There were 21 job openings in the area when he started his classes this month.
He wants a local truck route to stay close to home, but it will still be challenging for his family. His wife, Sediqa, does not speak English, nor does she know how to read or write, and does not feel comfortable going out by herself.
She also does not drive.
When she started learning English online, she was at “ground zero,” said her teacher, Sara Sundberg at Minnesota State Community and Technical College.
“When she came, she didn’t know what to do with a pencil. We had to show her. She held it kind of like a Henna tube,” said Sundberg, holding together her thumb and index finger tightly at the tip as if squeezing something.
Five months later, her handwriting is “meticulous,” and her pronunciation is excellent, Sundberg said. She’s even learning to say Minnesota with the long “oooo.”
“I’m teaching her how to communicate with the community and I want people to understand her,” Sundberg said. “Everything is brand new for her.”
Sediqa is slowly gaining confidence in speaking with her teacher, but with others she is silent, smiling and staying back with her children.
Everything is new for their children, too. Patan’s sons befriended a neighbor boy and jumped for the first time on a trampoline.
His oldest son, Maiwan, decorated his first pumpkin, while his two younger sons wore their traditional Afghan clothes because their teachers told them that on the Friday before Halloween the kids could “dress up,” something that was lost in translation but went unnoticed as the other kids excitedly showed them their costumes.
They look forward to the weekends with their “aunties” at the farm.
It gives you hope, it really does.