Everyone was Desperate

My name is Omaya.

When the Taliban took over, my husband and I were living in Kabul. The night they came, my husband went to the airstrip. He was trying to see how bad it was. We had it in our mind that we were going to leave with our kids. They were shooting everywhere. People were hanging on the planes. Everybody was very desperate. He came home and said that maybe it was safer to stay, but I said no, let’s risk it. I packed a small backpack with my kids’ clothes and everything. They already said on the news not to bring luggage. All we could bring was backpacks.

The traffic was crazy getting to the airport. Once we got there, the Taliban were yelling, “Down, get down, get down, sit down, nobody’s gonna move.” The American forces were telling them whoever has a passport, put them in line first, so American citizens can get out first. We were all the way at the end of a long long line. So when we were sitting there, all I heard was gunshots. I started crying. I said, “Let’s just go back. This is not worth it. I don’t want to risk our lives to go.” And then my husband said, “No, this has to happen, no matter what, we have to get through this.” And then my husband stood up, waving my passport. The Taliban told him to get down. But he said, “My wife is an American citizen. And my kids are in the process of being naturalized citizens.”

The Taliban said, “We don’t care.”

One of the Taliban was walking around, rounding up people and stuff. He came, and then my husband showed him my passport. And then said, “Okay, get up.”

I was scared. I saw people with their heads busted open. Some people were bleeding because they were fighting each other to go to the gate.

He told us to go around the back, because that’s the only way we could get through. When we went to the back, there was nobody there. But when we turned around there were maybe like 800 people behind us. People had started following us. It was crazy.

One of the military guys was standing there. When I showed him my passport, he took it and told us to wait. It took a few hours, because they were talking to somebody or something. There were walls there, and one wall had a small door. When they opened the door, people started pushing and pulling, asking to be let in. The kids got scattered. One of them was almost lost. People were snatching my kids and pulling them. So they shut the door back and put a ladder down. My husband climbed up first. And he told me, “I’m gonna climb up and then I’ll pull you guys up.” People threw the ladder off. They were trying to get onto it first. People were climbing and jumping and stuff. Somehow, I still don’t even remember, I had my baby in my hand. And I took her and I got up. We lost my kids because people were climbing over them. And then this man got a stick and started hitting people, because he saw we had little kids and how people were pulling on them. People were pulling on my baby’s legs. She was only 14 months old! They pulled at my legs too, and pulled my shoes off.

We spent two or three nights inside the Afghanistan base. They were sorting people into groups. The people that had no passport, or no status, or who had worked with the military or who were interpreters got put in a separate area. The people that had passports or worked with the Americans were put in another area. We had to wait two days there because there were a lot of people. And then we flew out on the big cargo planes. There weren’t any seats on the plane. We just sat on the ground.

I did take some medicine with me, like fever medicine, etc, but it wasn’t enough. We went to Qatar, where we stayed for seven days, in little trailers with two small bunk beds. I had a swing for the baby. It was very hot.

After Qatar we went to Germany. We spent two days there. Sometimes we were waiting in line for hours, eight to nine hours sitting on the floor. And then they would say, okay, get up. It would be 3am or something. You would make a place for your child to go to sleep in that area to be comfortable. And then you have to pick them up and get moving. We felt relieved to be out of Afghanistan, but nobody was telling us anything. We didn’t know what was going to happen next.

My baby daughter was really sick in Qatar, too. I kept taking her to the clinic. I was taking her day and night because she was vomiting. She had a really high fever. Nothing was working. She wasn’t taking milk, and she started losing a lot of weight. The guy in charge was really nice. He put our name on the list to try and get her out because she was not doing well. And then we landed in Germany. And when we got there, there was no medicine. My other daughter started getting sick, too. She started vomiting and diarrhea. Everybody was getting sick.

But eventually we got lucky. We got out in two days.

We came to Virginia. We spent a day there. They did something like a background check. Then we landed in Wisconsin, Madison county. There we were able to have access to medicine. My daughter eventually ended up at the Mayo clinic. They ran tests on her and found she has a few bacterias, and then found she had kidney stones. She has a lot of scarring in her kidney because of it. She also had reflux on both of her kidneys. They did surgery and fixed it. She looks healthy now.

From Virginia we went to Utah. We were in a hotel for two months. It was winter too, so we couldn’t go outside. Anne, our friend, helped us get resettled. She helped us more than IRC.

So when our friend Anne came to help, she had me write a list of things that we would normally eat, like Halal food. That made a big difference.

My dream for the future is for all of my children to get educated. And then I want to do what I like. I want to be an esthetician. My husband wants to start a business here. He studied coding, so he wants to go further in that. We have plans to buy a house and provide for all our kids.