Every day media outlets tell horrendous stories about the plight of Afghani citizens caught in Afghanistan and desperate to find safety in other countries. Today we will share with you the story of one of the families Maple Grove United Church has sponsored. The paperwork has been done for this family and they are waiting for final approval to come to Canada. They are one of the lucky ones.
The father is well educated and had been employed by a non governmental organization to promote the economic empowerment of women when he first graduated from university, followed by a career in the financial sector which allowed him to work abroad for a period.
Due to passport issues the family planned to return to Afghanistan and the wife and children went ahead to organize a home and schooling. The wife and her father-in-law immediately began to receive threatening anonymous phone calls from what was likely the Taliban saying they would be killed because they believed the husband had worked with NATO and American forces.
I will let the wife speak for what happened next.
At the time my children were going to school and we paid for a car service to drive them to and from school. The car service would always pick the children up in front of the house and then drop them off at school. The car had been a little late for some reason in picking up the children. The children were ready to go to school and around 8:00 AM we hear a loud explosion outside. When my father-in-law and brother-in-law went to find out what had happened, they discovered that the car that was there to pick the children up had a bomb attached to it and it exploded. We suspect that the Taliban had attached a magnetic time bomb to the car that night. The police came to investigate but we did not tell them about the threatening phone calls or that we suspected it was the Taliban or ISIS that did this. The police there are very corrupt, and many Taliban and ISIS informants are police.
After this close call the family continued to receive death threats and before long fled Afghanistan for good and now reside in Turkey. Their story is a typical one. We can’t help every Afghani whose story is similar but we can help some. Presently we have two families outside of Afghanistan who are desperate to find refuge in Canada and there are others that would like to escape that we have pledged to help.
Although we have the expertise to sponsor refugees, we are a small church. Our congregation cannot provide all the funds required. Please share this email widely so that others can do something to make this work viable. We know many people are upset and many care and are looking for something to do to assist. The first thing needed is money for sponsorships. It takes about $40,000 to support each family for a year. Please help us to help these people by dropping a cheque off in our mailbox on the wall at the back of the church or going to the Maple Grove United Church website, choosing the Please Donate Here button and picking Afghanistan refugees. There is no overhead on what you donate. We are all volunteers and every cent will be spent on the families and you will receive a tax donation slip.