12 NOVEMBER 2-8, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | compared to 9 percent of the U.S.-born population and 11.5 percent of the city’s immigrant population. Onosa and his friends founded the com- pany with $30,000, saving the rest and start- ing over with the sanduk to raise money for their fi rst delivery cars. After another two years, they had two of their own cars for medical supplies. At one point, though, revenue started to decline, and some friends pulled out their ini- tial investments. “A lot of them, they feel like the company is not going in the right direc- tion, so they stop: ‘I want my share,’” Onosa remembers. “We just give them the money until we get close to eleven, some of them also at the end. They said, ‘We don’t want the company, you can have it, just give us our money.’” Finally, there was just Onosa. But he stayed on good terms with his friends. “The good thing about our commu- nity is we know each other, we trust each other, and we know, if I don’t give you the money today, I will give it to you later,” he says. “It’s a commitment.” Today, Onosa’s business has eighteen delivery trucks. The money he earns “is the kind of money I was always trying to make for my family,” he says. “I’m happy with it.” Aside from working, Onosa loves to coach soccer. Gam- betta helped him start a soc- cer league in which the many African nations represented in Aurora — including Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and the Congo — have their own teams. Facing off against Onosa’s Sudanese team in the fi nals on October 15 was the Congolese team, the African Union team. In the stands that night were Gasimba and her two young children, who watched as refugees from Sudan triumphed over those from Congo. When Homayoon Milad arrived in Aurora in September 2021, it was late at night and cold. He couldn’t see anything in the dark. He’d come to the U.S. with his wife and three sons; the trip from Afghanistan had taken a month. They were among the last to leave as the Taliban retook control following the withdrawal of the American military that had been in the country for two decades. Milad grew up in Kabul, where his father was in the military. His family was Shia Muslim and part of the Hazara ethnic group. Afghanistan “is a very diverse place,” he says, fi lled with such ethnicities as Tajiks, Afghans, Pashtos and Uzbeks, who all speak different languages. He was still a teenager when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. The first time the Taliban collapsed, “people were happy that a regime was going that kept people under suppression, and people were ready to em- brace freedom. It was completely different,” he remembers. Milad was eighteen when the new Afghan constitution was written in 2003. Once he had his degree in crop sciences from Kabul University, he got a job visiting more than 3,800 villages in all 34 provinces to monitor their farming needs and see how the govern- ment could help. His experience and his fl uency in Dari Persian and Pashto helped him get work in 2020 with the U.S. Institute of Peace, an organization founded by Congress for peacekeeping and confl ict resolution around the world. “I was supposed to work for all Afghans,” he remembers. “Irrespective of their school of thought, their religion, their tribal af- fi liation, that was my job. I was really well accepted by the community.” Rather than asking about crops, Milad was now determining what local villages wanted to see in the way of justice to resolve confl icts with other village, provincial or fed- eral governments. Because he was working for the U.S. government, Milad qualifi ed for a Special Immigrant Visa, which was created in 2009 to protect Afghans and Iraqis who helped the U.S. during the two wars in the Middle East. He began applying for his SIV before he knew that the U.S. government was going to withdraw from the country. That date was fi nally set for August 15, 2021. Fortunately, Milad’s SIV had been approved ten days before, but the earliest fl ight he and his family could get on a U.S. Air Force plane was on August 26. As the U.S. began to withdraw, the dif- ference “was black and white,” he recalls. The last eleven days that Milad, his wife and three sons were in Afghanistan, they saw the Taliban enter the city. “Kabul was colorful, everything was colorful, coffee shops were full, these were the signs of development. With the fall of Kabul in August 2021, people had another type of feeling — that not only a public government collapsed, but also a nation has collapsed.” At 5:30 a.m. on August 26, Milad and his family left on one of the last planes out of Kabul. His parents and his brother were not able to accompany them to the airport. “I remember looking back at my door as I left and knowing this would be the last time I would see my home,” he recalls. “When I left Afghanistan, all my wealth, my car, my bank account, my house, it disap- peared,” he says. “But the biggest pain was I’m leaving as a person with no identity. The Afghanistan on August 14 had a fl ag, a three- color fl ag. On August 15, it had no fl ag. A fl ag is a sign of identity for a nation. We lost our fl ag, we lost our nation.” Their fl ight took the family from Kabul to Kuwait to Spain to Washington, D.C., to Hol- loman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Milad was numb. “I was watching that we were moving, we were traveling, but I was not feeling it,” he says. Milad had a sister who’d been living in Aurora for four years with her husband, who was also from Afghanistan. His brother- in-law picked up Milad’s family at the Air Force base. During the ten-hour drive from Alamogordo to Aurora, “you could see a lot of nice scenery, nice views, landscapes,” Milad remembers. “I was looking to these nice sceneries and talking to my brother-in- law and talking to the family, but nothing.” They arrived in Aurora at 8 p.m. on Sep- tember 19. “I was like a moving dead body,” Milad says. “I was breathing, but I was not feeling.” Milad and his family were resettled in Aurora by the International Rescue Com- mittee. While Milad searched for work, a community engagement position opened at the IRC, which called for meeting with refu- gees across metro Denver and helping them get adjusted as they resettled. It sounded like Milad’s old job in Afghanistan, and he got it just two months after arriving in Aurora. But during his fi rst year in Aurora, he still couldn’t shake that loss of feeling. “For almost one year, I was in a COVID mood,” Milad says. “No taste, no smell.” Two things began to change that. One was getting past his probation period to earn legal status as a refugee. “Now I’m more attached to my new community. That was a strong trigger for me, which allowed me to start rebuilding my life,” he says. The other came through his work, which is how he realized that Aurora shared a special similarity with Afghanistan: a sense of diversity and unity. “In Afghanistan, I am a Hazara, or you are Pashto or you are Uzbek,” he says. “Here, I’m an Afghan, there’s no tribal affi liation. But I learned that the people here, they’re from Syria, or they’re Jewish, or they’re from Af- rica, Kenya, Sudan. People from many places, but there is a unity, which was important in Afghanistan.” It’s important here, too. “I can start to see the results of my work,” he says. “I feel more attached to community members. They shared with me, I shared with them. We came together to support others. Those were the factors that triggered my life to feel more attached to my new beginning here in Aurora.” He knows refugees across the metro area and insists he knows every Afghan in Au- rora — more than 200, according to the city, including a handful of Christian Afghans. “We’re a close community, we go to mosque, we go to each other’s homes,” he says. “And even those who aren’t Muslim, we know.” Milad now considers Aurora the place he will live for the rest of his life. “I have a lot of friends around the country; I’ve traveled to twelve states the last two years. I’ve gotten a lot of messages from friends asking if I want to move out of Aurora,” Milad explains. “I could rebuild my connections with USIP, with the State Department, take a higher salary, but I said no to all of that. I found my home.” Connecting with his roots in agriculture, Milad compares his work to farming. Two years after he landed in Aurora, he wants to stay for the harvest. “It’s not out of laziness. I want to plant my seeds here and wait for the harvest,” he says. “I’m trying to harvest a lot of seeds with my community.” Among other things, he’s planting seeds with other parents to encourage their chil- dren to consider work in politics, hoping that one day soon an Aurora election will feature the child of a refugee. “I can never be president. We can never be president because we were born outside the U.S.,” he points out. “But our kids were born here. That’s why I tell other refugees to push their kids towards politics — senator, mayor, governor, whatever, because there they can make the difference.” Email the author at [email protected]. Coming to America continued from page 10 Homayoon Milad was one of the last to leave Afghanistan; two months later, he was helping other refugees. EVAN SEMÓN EVAN SEMÓN
