Meet Fahim
On October 4th of 2021, thousands of Afghans turned on their TVs to hear the voice of Fahim. Every weekday for years, children learned and laughed as he voiced puppets on the Afghan version of Sesame Street. Two days later, Fahim was out of the country, fleeing to nearby Qatar out of concern for his life.
He was one of over 1.6 million Afghans that fled the country in 2021, leaving behind jobs, loved ones, and the only place they had ever called home. Fahim was well-known and well-respected in Afghanistan, he left all of this behind to live in a country he had never before been to and whose language he didn’t speak.
Fahim’s path towards living in Colorado was uncommon. Most ACC community members spend over 10 years living in a refugee camp before arriving in the United States. For Fahim and the other Afghans fleeing in 2021, the process occurred a lot quicker.
Fahim first flew to a military base in Qatar. Then to a base in Philadelphia where he would live for the next 3.5 months, before finally arriving in Denver in February of 2022. This journey proved both mentally and physically difficult.
“When I got here in Denver, I was struggling a lot with the language because I didn’t know English well, and I was looking for a job. And I had chronic pain in my back,”
Fahim said in an interview.
ACC helped Fahim set up his Medicaid so he could get support managing his back pain and provided a teacher to assist in learning English. They also helped Fahim in finding a job which would take up most of his time during his first year in the United States.
During his first year, Fahim worked at a hotel and United Airlines. Everyday, his schedule was the same:
2:00p.m.: Wake up to eat and shower
3:00p.m.: Take the train to the airport for his first job
4:00p.m. - 10:00p.m.: Work
10:00p.m.: Take an Uber from his first job to his second job
11:00p.m. - 7:00a.m.: Work at his second job
8:00a.m.: After working 14 hours, arrive home and sleep.
Despite this nightmare of a shift, never once during his interview did Fahim discuss the difficulty and exhaustion he must have felt. Instead, he expressed sincere gratitude to the people that helped him during this time. Four years after his arrival, he still talks about how thankful he is for the man that hired him at his first job in the hotel, the kindness of Alex, his immigration attorney, and ACC as an organization during his first few years in the United States. Despite it all, Fahim shared that
“The people who want to come to this country ... they are not coming here for enjoying. There's something going wrong in their countries. They're coming here for a better life.”
Story collected by: Jessi Kalambayi
Written by: Jake Christy
Edited by: Iftu Abdi