American Dreams Come True
Huffington Post | Peter A. Georgescu
Parwiz Abrahimi is a brilliant, good-humored grad student at Yale who hopes to break new ground in science and medicine. It can be surprising to learn that when he was a toddler, his family was struggling simply to stay alive in Afghanistan. That was in the late '80s, when Afghan rebels were successfully repelling the Soviet presence. It was also back when it was risky to be a native Afghan who wasn't Sunni or looked different from a typical citizen. Abrahimi is Hazara: an Asian-looking minority with a Shiite faith. The Hazara were among the first to settle in Afghanistan, possibly a descendant of the Mongols who invaded centuries ago. How Abrahimi was able to escape the brutality of that culture and find his way into one of the most exclusive educational programs in the world is a story of what America still means as a land of opportunity. It's also a story of how valuable immigration can be to our society.
As a member of a religious and ethnic minority in Kabul, Abrahimi's father was targeted for death by the Taliban, so the family came to the United States, settling in Washington state with only a tenuous link to American life -- his father's acquaintance with a Seattle woman who had come to Afghanistan with the Peace Corps to teach half a century ago. His family literally had nothing, but they all worked feverishly to make enough money to put Abrahimi's mother through nursing school, so that her income could become the cornerstone of a future for her husband and four children. It's a classic story of worth ethic, self-made success, but it relied on a crucial safety net at the start. When they settled near Seattle, the Abrahimi family accepted welfare and relied on food banks to survive. It gave them just enough of a window to become self-sufficient. To support the family, as his mother labored through eight years of schooling to earn a two-year associates degree, Abrahimi and his siblings worked as a team with their father. They bought and resold car parts at local flea markets. They delivered newspapers. The kids kept the household running when their father took jobs as an interpreter and translator, exploiting his knowledge of Persian and Russian. His mother struggled, year after year, taking exams and failing, then taking them again and finally succeeding. "We succeeded and failed along with her," he said, talking by phone from the Yale campus. "After she took a test, she already knew she had failed. When she cried, we all cried. When she succeeded, we all succeeded."
Parwiz Abrahimi is a brilliant, good-humored grad student at Yale who hopes to break new ground in science and medicine. It can be surprising to learn that when he was a toddler, his family was struggling simply to stay alive in Afghanistan. That was in the late '80s, when Afghan rebels were successfully repelling the Soviet presence. It was also back when it was risky to be a native Afghan who wasn't Sunni or looked different from a typical citizen. Abrahimi is Hazara: an Asian-looking minority with a Shiite faith. The Hazara were among the first to settle in Afghanistan, possibly a descendant of the Mongols who invaded centuries ago. How Abrahimi was able to escape the brutality of that culture and find his way into one of the most exclusive educational programs in the world is a story of what America still means as a land of opportunity. It's also a story of how valuable immigration can be to our society.
As a member of a religious and ethnic minority in Kabul, Abrahimi's father was targeted for death by the Taliban, so the family came to the United States, settling in Washington state with only a tenuous link to American life -- his father's acquaintance with a Seattle woman who had come to Afghanistan with the Peace Corps to teach half a century ago. His family literally had nothing, but they all worked feverishly to make enough money to put Abrahimi's mother through nursing school, so that her income could become the cornerstone of a future for her husband and four children. It's a classic story of worth ethic, self-made success, but it relied on a crucial safety net at the start. When they settled near Seattle, the Abrahimi family accepted welfare and relied on food banks to survive. It gave them just enough of a window to become self-sufficient. To support the family, as his mother labored through eight years of schooling to earn a two-year associates degree, Abrahimi and his siblings worked as a team with their father. They bought and resold car parts at local flea markets. They delivered newspapers. The kids kept the household running when their father took jobs as an interpreter and translator, exploiting his knowledge of Persian and Russian. His mother struggled, year after year, taking exams and failing, then taking them again and finally succeeding. "We succeeded and failed along with her," he said, talking by phone from the Yale campus. "After she took a test, she already knew she had failed. When she cried, we all cried. When she succeeded, we all succeeded."
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