Donate NowI've known Dost Mohammad for five years now. We met when I was living in Phoenix and working as a reporter for The Arizona Republic. Dost, originally from Afghanistan, was not living in Phoenix by choice. Rather, he was there because it is where he was resettled by the U.S. government after leaving his home country as a refugee.
When we met in 2003 I was volunteering in my spare time for an organization called COAR - Community Outreach & Advocacy for Refugees (www.coarweb.org). COAR was started by a close college friend of mine, who came to the U.S. as a refugee herself. The organization pairs community members with recently resettled refugees to help ease the transition for those who have come from all over the world to the U.S. through the UNHCR resettlement program.
Dost, his mother Fakhria, and his younger brother Farshad left Afghanistan in September 2001, shortly after Dost was stricken with Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Immediately following Sept. 11, 2001, Afghans knew that it would only be a matter of days before the U.S. entered the scene and Dost saw that his window of time to leave the country for medical care was short. So he left his home city of Mazar-i-Sharif in the north of Afghanistan and went to Pakistan, seeking medical treatment. Though he wanted to return home to Afghanistan, he was unable to receive the medical attention he needed there, and the country was far too unstable for the family to make a safe return. After two years in Pakistan the three family members were resettled in the U.S.
wI started working with Dost's mother shortly after the family arrived in Arizona in 2003. I would come to the family's home on weekend afternoons and sit with Fakhria reviewing flash cards with English words on one side and pictures on the other. It was the beginning of the long transition into American life. Oftentimes after working wit Fakhria I would sit with Dost, who was then confined to a bed due to his post-Guillain-Barre Syndrome paralysis. Bright and articulate, Dost would tell me stories about his life, the trauma of the Taliban era, and about leaving his country. As Dost adjusted to his new life in the U.S. he started writing. He began blogging and became an active commentator on the advances and setbacks he watched happening from afar, in Afghanistan. As a disabled person, he particularly honed in on the conditions of the disabled in Afghanistan. In 2006 he began to form a non-profit organization to advocate on behalf of Afghanistan's disabled community, which makes up roughly 10 percent of the country's population. I ended up writing an article on his activism for The Arizona Republic. (His organization's website can be viewed at www.friends-rc.org)
Through the years, after I moved away from Arizona, I followed Dost's life and observations through his blog posts and our personal correspondence. In August 2007, when I first moved to New York, Dost called me with some big news - he was planning to return to Afghanistan to get married. It would be his first prolonged trip home since 2001. He told me he wanted to document the trip and look at the changes the country has experienced since he left, in the wake of seven years of Western presence and influence. I signed on immediately. Though I was trained as a print reporter, I felt that the experience would be best conveyed directly by Dost and decided to approach the project as a documentary. I spent the next ten months learning how to use digital cameras and video editing equipment, and I recruited two top-notch journalists to come with us to Afghanistan: Don Duncan to oversee video production and Peter Van Agtmael to photograph the trip. The three of us set off this May to accompany Dost on his journey home.