Stranger Becomes Neighbor

In our final bonus episode, host Andrea Smardon talks to one of the founders of the Blacksburg Refugee Partnership, the all-volunteer group that supports Sima and other veterans of the Afghan Female Tactical Platoon as they rebuild their lives in the U.S.

Co-founder Scott Bailey talks about how it all started with a conversation among concerned friends in church and shares the secrets to their organization’s success - how regular citizens without any prior experience pulled together to form a community of support. He says it’s not about being "helpers," but being "partners." And he talks about the rewards that partnership offers for everyone involved.

They’re known as Zero Units – forces of Afghan men who served in their country’s National Strike Units, the NSU. These specially trained counter-terrorism soldiers worked in cooperation with the U.S. military and intelligence communities.

In this episode, Andrea speaks with Geeta Bakshi, a former CIA operations manager and counterterrorism expert- code named "Blackbird." Bakshi has first-hand experience with the Zero Units, both in Afghanistan and in America. Bakshi is also the founder of FAMIL, an organization dedicated to ensuring that Afghan partners who served on behalf of the United States are supported as they resettle in America.

When small business owner Doug Richmond heard the story of one Afghan father and how he risked his life helping Americans in their counterterrorism efforts, he was inspired to help his family. He realized the best thing he could do was to offer him a job in his business. It started with one hire, but Doug had no idea he would end up hiring a dozen men from the same Afghan special forces unit. Doug talks to Andrea about what one person can do and how we can’t know the impact of our actions.

An experiment to allow women in Afghanistan to help U.S. special forces during combat raids was a full-fledged program by the time the American military pulled out of the country in 2021. Sergeant Rebekah Edmondson was there as the Cultural Support Program began and Americans started training women from Afghanistan to became soldiers as part of the Female Tactical Platoon. In a candid interview, she gets honest about the challenges of developing trust across different cultures and under pressures of war. Now she feels a personal responsibility to make sure these Afghan soldiers are supported in America. Rebekah’s work continues now with the PenFed foundation to assist these women who were allies to the U.S.

As refugees living in the US, Nazifa and her sister founded a non-profit organization called HOPE for Afghanistan, which funded education for girls and women in their home country. But when the Taliban took power in 2021, everything they had been working on collapsed overnight. The students and teachers they were supporting risked death if they tried to continue their quest for education. It seemed as though their efforts had reached a dead end, but Nazifa and her sister have found a way to quietly keep HOPE for Afghanistan going. This is the story behind that effort.