The Sunday Read: ‘She’s at Brown. Her Heart’s Still in Kabul.’

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Going to college can be a shock to most: Leaving the comfort of friends and family for a leap into the unknown, a fresh start. But what is the university experience like as a refugee? The journalist Maddy Crowell met some of the 148 Afghan women who have been enrolled in U.S. colleges to complete their degrees, and relates how they have adapted to American and collegiate life a year on from the fall of Kabul. It has, she finds, been far from easy. Ms. Crowell wrote that one student said “she spent her days pinballing among exhaustion, despair and a sort of cautious optimism.”

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Maddie Kroll.
0:02.8	I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine and the writer of this week's Sunday Read.
0:07.4	This is a story about immigration or assimilation into American society.
0:13.1	But I think it's also about what it's like to lose everything and start over again.
0:19.1	So hella Hashimi was 23 years old when we first met.
0:24.2	But we almost didn't.
0:26.0	She was so shy.
0:27.3	I thought she might cancel our first interview.
0:29.7	It was February in Providence, Rhode Island.
0:33.1	Brown University's campus was covered in about a foot of snow.
0:37.1	I met Suhila at the student center.
0:39.6	We talked for so long that she invited me to dinner.
0:42.8	It was around 7.30 and the dining halls were jammed with students standing in long lines.
0:48.8	Since she got to Brown, Suhila had been struggling to find things she could eat.
0:53.8	So she stuck to her usual, which was cheese pizza and salad.
0:57.4	She joked that at least the dining halls offered ice cream.
1:00.6	So hella told me how much she missed her mother's cooking,
1:04.0	especially her mother's cobbly pullow.
1:06.5	The steamed rice, the carrots, the raisins, and meat,
1:09.6	and just how inedible the food on campus felt to her.
1:13.3	Suhila is an Afghan refugee who fled Kabul last summer.
1:20.0	She got to Brown around Christmas right before the next semester started
	...

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