Our Colleague Mahnaz’s Experience at the Tenement Museum and as an Asylum-Seeker

Our colleague, Mahnaz Akbari, visited the Tenement Museum upon her arrival to the United States. This powerful essay includes her thoughts on that experience and how it relates to her own as an asylum - seeker in the U.S. 

I recently visited for the first time the NYC Tenement Museum with some of my colleagues; many years ago, some immigrant families had lived there. The buildings were built for poor people and working class people that came from overseas with nothing. Several families had to live together in the same apartment but without good living conditions: they did not have any modern amenities that we take for granted, like running water, plumbing, or a refrigerator. They got together and tolerated many difficulties and challenges to provide a better life for themselves and their families and also for communities (I mean for other people that live in the community). When I was at the Tenement Museum, I completely felt their happiness for a brighter future but also know from personal experience that it must have been really hard for them to stay strong with all of the challenges they faced.

Describe the Tenement Museum in your eyes

The Tenement Museum is housed in a very old apartment with wooden stairs - the sound of its old wood creaking could be heard with every step - which was a home for multiple families many years ago. It had very narrow corridors and some very small rooms that several families lived in, often together.

In one of the rooms, next to the window that opened onto Ludlow Street, there was a sewing table and an old iron, which was said to be the workplace of one of the families. Among all of the other old objects, a sample of women’s clothing with long sleeves and a long skirt that covers the neck to the feet caught my attention: I immediately remembered the dressing of women in my home country of Afghanistan, especially in very rural areas. 

During my ten years of military service in Afghanistan, I traveled to many places and saw many women dressed almost in the same style I saw in the Tenement Museum. At that time I remembered that when I was younger, I used to watch a lot of American TV series like Village Doctor and it seemed like almost all the women were dressed in that style. There, a question came to my mind, apart from Islam, were there other religions or cultures where women wear fully covered clothes, and why? 

Back in the Tenement Museum, there was a lamp hanging from the ceiling of the room, the source when I saw it was electricity, but the woman guiding our group said that at that time they used another source, which produced very little light and the tailor had to sew with the same low light, straining his eyes to be able to see. I remembered my mother saying that my grandfather was a tailor in a remote village in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, maybe seventy or eighty years ago. My mother told me that we had very difficult conditions at that time: sometimes we didn’t even have food to eat - sometimes we had to eat salt stone because there was no other food available - but I was a kid and I didn’t really care about things like that at the time - I thought all over the world is the same.

She said I didn’t know that there is a bigger world out there - maybe it was because we didn’t have the opportunity as girls to get educated. She told me that her father was a tailor and he sewed day and night to earn money, she said they didn’t have electricity, and her father used an oil lamp that was made from animal fat, and it had very little light, but he sewed and sewed until midnight, and my mother and and her brother were happily playing with the light. 

Many years later, my grandfather became one of the big owners of land in that area, but I don’t know if it was all worth it or not because today or tomorrow it will become the property of the Taliban, who are forcing people to move from their property and they themselves take ownership of that property. How beautiful is the peace and security that turned the residence of that tailor in the tenement, who sewed day and night, into a museum and how ugly is the face of war that turns my grandfather’s property into the domain of a terrorist group today or tomorrow.

I really wanted to open the old and small window of the Tenement Museum to see the street and feel the air and watch the street from the tailor’s eye, to understand the sights and scents of the outside when he became so tired, but I wasn’t allowed to open it. I am pretty sure after doing hard work, watching people moving around outside would be very soothing.

After viewing the inside of the tenement, our guide at the museum took us to the yard, where there was a well that families had to take water from, bringing it from the downstairs to their residences upstairs. 

I was thinking how hard it was when a woman had to take the water up the stairs and at the same time, be careful that her skirt doesn’t make her fall. We learned that sometimes the kids in that era had to bring the water upstairs: I imagined small children doing that during a freezing New York winter or experiencing the summer heat, while crammed into the small apartment with several other families. 

I remembered when, after arriving in the United States, I was in the camp Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, several families living in a building, with no privacy, having a hard time sleeping during the night, with people restless and some of the kids crying.

Or when there was an ill patient in the building and people were asked to be quiet but the kids could not be silent and it was very hard. Maybe the worst thing, though, was the cold weather in Wisconsin, a big building without a heater - it was freezing! But I am sure the peop[le living in the Tenement museum had a worse situation than ours.

Nothing was worse than Afghanistan, where people have been dying because of cold, food, war, explosions, ethnicity, religions, and of course, being female. Where children’s toys are defused mines from wars. Where women are called black-headed and men put chains of captivity on their feet and condemn them to cook and wash and give birth forever. Where the Taliban and other terrorist groups commit genocide., 

How seeing the Tenement Museum impacted Mahnaz

Seeing the Tenement museum, and how immigrants in New York used to live, mostly makes me think of poor countries like Afghanistan that still have the same situation and are today suffering the poor conditions of living. Afghanistan, because of war for many years, people have been kept away from education; even during the past 20 years of foreign forces in the country, a lot of places didn't have access to education because we had the presence of Taliban in those places and shortage of schools and teachers, and most people are poor. But since the Taliban came back in full force a year ago, the majority of people don’t have enough food to eat three times a day, there are no jobs, there no security in Afghanistan, and during the winter people don’t have electricity or wood or coal to keep themselves warm, 

The difference between immigrants coming to the United States a hundred years ago, versus Mahnaz coming here under duress

But I think as an Afghan immigrant that recently came to the US, there is one true common point between me and the families I learned about in the Tenement Museum, and it is to begin life from zero; but it has different concepts for me and them. 

For them, they left their countries with the motivation of having a better life with better opportunities. They chose to leave the country, and that makes the bitterness and difficulty of it both easier and sweeter. 

But I as an Afghan immigrant didn’t choose to leave my country, I had to leave, because if I didn’t leave, something bad might have happened to me or my family. I had my life there and I was satisfied from it - I love my country, I love my job, I love everything that I had in Afghanistan. I fought for 10 years for freedom, for my country, and I saw and felt the pain of people in my country and I was hopeful that maybe someday we would have a real peace in my country.

That’s why my colleagues and I fought, some becoming wounded, and some becoming martyrs. Thousands of children lost their fathers, thousands of parents lost their sons and daughters, thousands of women lost their husbands because of freedom, but everything disappeared in one night. It was unbelievable to us, but the Taliban came and our country went back to 20 years ago, when the girls weren’t allowed to go school, when girls were used as slaves at home and her job was to provide sexual services to her husband and have babies and cook and clean the house. When the girls had to marry at age of 10, 11 or 12, when the girls were treated as a thing that a husband can use or beat. Our country has gone back to 20 years ago when the Taliban made the school a place that they just teaches their own ideology of Islam to the boys, and educated them as they want to move their political desires forward. Our country went back to 20 years ago when it was a safe place for terrorist groups. And I will be the witness of massacre and genocide against Hazaras more and more - I’ve been afraid that in the future there will be no more Hazaras left in the country. For all of those reasons, I had to leave.

My life in Afghanistan

I was born and I grew up in Iran, where I had a safe life: there was no Taliban or terrorist groups, but it had so many other problems. So finally my family decided to come back to Afghanistan. There, I joined the Army, where I found my identity. We bought a small and beautiful house in the west of Kabul where Hazaras people live, called Dasht Barchi. It’s also a place right now where the Taliban and ISIS have been doing a lot of suicide attacks, in schools, in hospitals, in maternity wards, in weddings salons, in mosques. I believe the goal in this is to kill Hazara people in an act of genocide. 

When I joined the military I decided to continue my education, so I went to night school to study politics. I had to leave my house at 5:30 in the morning and come back at 9 p.m., which was dark in the winter and so dangerous - but it was my goal to do that and I did it. I had a lot of bad experiences during those four years of my education: several times people attacked me and beat me but I had to do it. 

In 2013, the unit with which I worked (The Ktah Khas, or KKA, one of the initial national counter-terrorism units for Afghanistan) decided to give me a higher position as a major in the military and after that I continued my job as Female Tactical Platoon Commander. It was a really hard job because I had to resolve a lot of cultural conflicts between female and men soldiers during my job, but I loved that my girls, despite challenges, were working in a male-dominated area, very far away from family - they were so strong. By working with male Americans and Afghan soldiers, they were breaking the taboo, breaking the chain. 

Those years were my best years, ones where I feel I achieved my dreams and my goals. After Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, I had to leave my family, my job, my friends and my country and now I witness (from afar) human rights violations and female rights violations - my people are dying because of the shortage of food, and the Taliban are killing people in the name of their religion, their ethnicity. 

The night that I was supposed to go inside the Kabul airport on August 17, 2021 was like a nightmare for me: I was responsible for getting more than 50 people with their families inside the airport with the help of Americans. That night I was told to keep the Female Tactical Platoon (FTP) members together. We were around the airport, surrounded by a lot of people from different ethnicities, male, female, children, young, old. It felt like the entire population of Kabul came there and all of them had a goal to run away from their country taken over by the Taliban. 

Everyone had bad memories from the Taliban, nobody wants to live under their government. It was an awful situation. At the airport, there were a lot of Taliban around, who were beating people with whips and using their weapons to disperse people, but people stayed strong and didn’t leave the airport. 

It was midnight that Americans called me and told me to bring the members of the FTP next to the door and they had to grab their hands together to stay together, but when we got closer to the door, the girls dispersed in the crowd. After trying hard, around 30 of us FTPs got into the airport, but because we burned all of our military identity documents back home and the American that was supposed to help us was still next to the main gate, the other we were sent outside the airport again. It was chaotic, terrifying and miserable. I was freaking out, some of the girls were crying, because they lost their parents and children among the crowd and they didn’t want to try again to go inside the airport. I called out to an American guy again and told him what happened; he had me bring the girls again next to the door, but this time it was even harder, and the girls completely dispersed. It was dark and it was so hard to find anyone, even sitting on one of the American’s shoulders trying to find the women and girls I knew with a hand light.

So many people were asking me to help get them inside the airport, but there was only so much I could do to help. I felt sick. I saw a female with Asian face who was crying and said “I am American” but I couldn’t do anything.  I saw one FTP among the crowd who couldn’t breathe, her eyes were closed and she was just stuck among the crowd. Another soldier and I were able to help her inside the airport, but there were still a lot of FTPs missing, so I went out several more times to try and find them. It was a very bad night. 

I spent three nights in the Kabul airport to help FTPs get inside but after three straight days and nights, I was ill, exhausted and injured, and it was finally time to evacuate to America.

My life in America

Coming from this sort of trauma, it’s really hard to build a whole life from scratch. As I described, I was set to leave the Kabul airport in August of 2021, and was guided to a huge Cargo airplane, which brought back a lot of memories, because it was the same kind of airplane that during my job in the military I flew to travel to different parts of Afghanistan.

I remember one day that I and Mary, my American colleague, were supposed to go to one of the provinces, and we had to travel with that kind of airplane; I said to Mary that sometimes I was scared to fly with this kind of airplane because they carry very huge stuff and I feel that it is going to fall. Mary comforted me - she smiled and said, “Me too.” 

But this time was different, I was going to travel but not inside Afghanistan, I was traveling outside of Afghanistan, directly to the United States, and this time the airplane wasn’t heavy - it was just filled with people. Everyone was quiet, even the children. You could feel fear and sadness in people. I sat between my two nieces, both scared from the situation, and scared for their parents and their siblings' lives, because they remained in Afghanistan. I was between them - they could put their heads on my shoulders, I could calm them - but there was nobody to calm me. I was worried for my family, I was worried for my colleagues, I was sad for all things that I had lost, for my country, for my lovely job, for everything that I tried hard to achieve. I don’t know how much I cried but I know it was the worst day in my life.

Finally we made it to the US. The government admitted us with parole status that allows us to stay for up to two years and to work. I spent two months in the Fort McCoy camp in Wisconsin. There were a lot of people in that camp, and most people didn’t have Sim cards for their phones. There was a place that had free WiFi, so a lot of people came to that area to call their families back in Afghanistan, and I did the same, every day. That place for me was special, because it was the only place that I could connect with my family and with other people also. I had seen a lot of people crying while talking to their families back home - some of them lost their family members, and the Taliban went to others’ houses and took their family members. I was surrounded by people hearing bad news, and people crying and sighing. It was so unpleasant but I had to go there to talk to my own family. Two months in that camp passed for me like two years. I dreamed every night and my night became morning with nightmares. I was so tired, so broken, so disappointed. 

But finally my nieces and I made it out of the camp. I thought that perhaps outside of camp I would feel better, but it was the same because the situation in Afghanistan was the same. Every day hear bad news about Afghanistan, about the Taliban, about girls that are not allowed go to school, about the genocide of Hazaras. But I am lucky enough to have some American friends here that are helping me a lot and providing a lot of support, and the organization that I work for - Immigrant ARC! - also supports me a lot. They’re all teaching me the life skills I need here, but it’s sometimes hard, because everything is so very different than in Afghanistan. 

Differences in status between Mahnaz and immigrants that came before

I imagine that for the immigrants that lived in the Tenement Museum, the news of finding a new land with a lot of opportunity and endless land spread so far between people at that time was something amazing.  I am sure the news of the return of a ship from that blessed land would attract many people to the ports to hear about the vast new country, from night to morning the stories of the overseas heaven were the stories of people and children. A heaven that you don’t need a passport or visa for, all you needed was to make a decision - maybe a hard decision - but also a good decision to leave your country with the hope of better opportunities for a better life, with a friendly door open to everyone.

Although I was admitted to the United States as a person with parole, I do not have permanent status here. On September 23, 2022, I had my interview for Asylum in America, a familiar and stressful situation for an Afghan immigrant. My lawyer, who is a volunteer and represents me pro bono - which is part of the work we do at Immigrant ARC to try to find more ways to get immigrant representation) and I tried hard to make a very good declaration for my Asylum to prove that if I return to Afghanistan,  I will be in danger or persecuted because of my work in the military with Americans during the past 10 years, and also as a Hazaras female in Afghanistan.

In several meetings I had to explain things about myself that I never even thought about before -  my whole life in a few conversations. I had a lot of things to talk about, a lot of things in my life that didn’t seem important for me at that time but are stories that may change my life, from joining the military to getting to the airport gate in August, and everything in between. I had to talk about my job, my missions. But as I am working for an immigration organization, I know that it’s possible that even though I worked with Americans for 10 years, if I myself caused harm to someone on one of those missions, they could potentially not grant me Asylum. In US law, immigration is barred for those who work in the military if they persecuted others. I feel I was persecuted mentally by seeing a lot of violence, blood, screaming, crying, the sound of shots, helicopters, bombs, tanks, and so many things that for a lot of people are just in movies. I don’t know who will ask the Taliban, “Did you persecute someone?” Nobody won’t ask, of course, but I will answer: Yes, they do it day and night, mentally and physically. 

A lot of my colleagues whom I spent every single day with doing training or going to the missions, are disappearing, or getting captured or killed. 

I had a male colleague, J (I am not using his full name here). I used to teach him English and handwriting: learning English was harder for him, but he picked up handwriting very quickly. He and I also went for 4 mile runs outside of camps two times a week at 6 a.m.. - he was pretty fast but I tried to keep up with him. 

He was an instructor and also a platoon surgeon. Every time that he wanted to make a training regimen for his soldiers, he came to my door and asked me to help. He was very serious but very kind also. It has been several months since the Taliban captured him and every day, they torture him. We have no idea when the Taliban will release him or kill him. One of my other friends said that J's son went to see his father but he couldn’t recognize him because his entire face was black from the beatings he was enduring. So many of my friends have the same stories, just different names.  

I don’t know is there anyone in the US that has seen genocide up close as I have seen. For 20 years, we tried to tell the world community a genocide was happening against Hazaras (and now Panshiries) but nobody has heard us. The country is theirs now, and the Taliban and other terrorist groups killing our people operate with impunity.