Exit Strategy

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/magazine/exit-strategy.html

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It was nine years ago, when I was 23, that I first tried to leave Afghanistan. I had been working as an interpreter for coalition forces, and I started getting phone calls from the Taliban. They would say, ‘‘We will find you, and we will kill you.’’ They claimed to know my name and where I was living. I don’t know if it was true — when you worked with the Americans, you hid your face to protect yourself — but interpreters had been killed before. I felt I had to try to go to Europe and make a new life there. So I went to a kachakbar, a smuggler, to get me out of the country.

It cost $700 U.S. There was a little group of us who went. But soon after we crossed into Turkey, we found ourselves surrounded by the border police. They put us in jail for seven days, before deporting us back to the Iranian border, where we were told to walk home. Then, in Iran, we were taken by thieves. Luckily, I speak Persian. After they sold me to someone else for $500, I was able to persuade this person to let me go.

That scared me off trying to go for a while, and I didn’t really want to leave my home country anyway. But some years later, another interpreter was on a bus outside Kabul when he was dragged off and killed. So I decided to try again.

I met one kachakbar who asked for $10,000 and said he could take my friend and me to England. He told us he was related to President Karzai. I told him that I couldn’t trust Karzai even when he was president, so how could I trust him? Then I saw two other kachakbars who each had an office at a big shopping mall in Kabul. They called themselves travel agents, not kachakbars. I was not impressed with either one of them.

The next kachakbar was an elected official, believe it or not. When we went to see him at his office near Ghazi Stadium, he had bodyguards protecting him. He said he could take us to England for $18,000. He took our passports, and then told us we owed a thousand dollars each. We said we didn’t have the money, at which point he threatened to kill us. But I never heard from him again and never got my passport back. (I had to pay about $100 and wait many weeks to get a new one.)

The kachakbar after that told us that he would send us to Brazil; from there, he said, we could get into Canada or the U.S. And so I gave him my passport. But that night I found out that it’s just as difficult to get into Canada from Brazil as it is from Afghanistan. Next morning, I called the kachakbar and I asked for my passport back. He said no, so I had to replace it for the second time.

It was all pretty frustrating. It had taken me a couple of years to get nowhere. Last December, I decided to apply for a special immigrant visa to the U.S. for Afghans who worked on behalf the American government. I collected all the documents, and sent it off. But it still hasn’t come through. And meanwhile there is no life for me here. There is no freedom, no security, no future, no economy, no jobs. So last month my friend and I met yet another smuggler in a restaurant.

He kept saying, ‘‘I am not a kachakbar, I am a good man.’’ I said, ‘‘Hey, man, you don’t want to call yourself a kachakbar, that’s fine by me.’’ He said he helped people make their dreams come true. I said, ‘‘Sure, whatever.’’ But he seems to know what he is doing. We’d fly to Tehran, where someone would greet us and take us across the border to Turkey. From Turkey, we’d go to Bulgaria, and then on from there. He asked for $10,000 each, which I can’t afford, but my friends and family said they would help me.

But a couple of weeks ago, I talked­ to some people who finally got their special visas, and they advised me to wait at least another month. If I go with the kachakbar, I will be an illegal immigrant in Europe. If I get the visa, I can enter the U.S. on a completely legal basis. So I am back to waiting.

Yesterday was like the day before, which was like the day before that. The first thing I did was check my email from my laptop in bed for word on the visa. The second thing I did was go back to sleep; because I am jobless, there is nothing to do. I had breakfast at home with my mom, dad and sister. We don’t talk when we eat, but I know that they hope I will be able to go.

After that, I went to see my friend where he works as a guard. He is planning to leave soon, and he is angry that I am not going, but what can I do? ‘‘I really need you to come with me,’’ he started saying. ‘‘Come with me please. I will be alone. I don’t want to leave by myself.’’ He told me not to worry about the money, that he would pay for it.

‘‘Let me think about it,’’ I said. ‘‘Just give me some time.’’