BRATTLEBORO-A new podcast, Brattleboro-grown, is now available from Vermont Public.
Produced by Elissa Pine and Jennifer Sutton of Two Daughters Productions, The Afghan Women of Brattleboro profiles the lives of refugees who fled Afghanistan after the Taliban seized power there in 2021.
Of the tens of thousands of Afghans the U.S. evacuated to safety that year, some 100 people of all ages ended up in the greater Brattleboro area.
The six-episode podcast was the first such project for Pine, executive director of Welcome Hill Studios, a women's art retreat center in West Chesterfield, New Hampshire, and Sutton, a Brattleboro-based writer, editor, reporter, and teacher.
"The idea came from Elissa," Sutton explains. "We were working with Afghan families who were new to Brattleboro. Elissa started at the very beginning, and I became a volunteer a few months later."
As reported in a Vermont Public news release about the project, the refugees' arrival "brought change - not just for the women themselves but for the local residents who helped them settle in, and for Brattleboro as a whole."
Sutton explains "as we spent time with women who came from all different backgrounds in Afghanistan, we developed a lot of admiration for them."
"And we were totally inspired: They were all different ages, [had] different [stories], [were from] different parts of the country, [experienced] different family situations, but they had all experienced the same or similar fear, danger, trauma of having to flee their country and leave family members behind," she says.
Breaking stereotypes
Pine adds that from the beginning she and Sutton wanted "tobreak the stereotype that we were seeing - even among our own friends who had a certain vision of what these women were like."
Given the vastly different backgrounds among them, no one profile fit, she says.
Inspired by "their strength and their determination to figure stuff out," even in an extremely difficult situation, Sutton adds, the team sought to share stories of women willing to tell them.
"This was not a story for us to tell on our own," says Pine. "We wanted to do the best we could to keep our own voices out of it."
Sutton adds that they "wanted to provide a space and a platform, so we first started working with an Afghan woman named Ziagul, who was a journalist in Afghanistan."
Sutton and Pine formed Two Daughters to develop the project with Ziagul's guidance. Also an interview subject in the series, "[Ziagul] helped us launch the project and did some of the initial interpretation," Sutton says.
Ultimately, Ziagul suggested that the two hire Negina Azimi. "And Negina graciously joined us," Sutton says.
Azimi, who served as interpreter, script editor, and all-around advisor for the podcast series - and is also the subject of episode three - has been a caseworker at the Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC), a national resettlement agency with a Brattleboro presence, since 2022.
And she was one of five ArtLords, a group of Afghan artists working locally who aim to "wage peace through art by creating murals worldwide," Azimi says.
"I graduated from law school back in Afghanistan and also from the Fine Arts Institute of Kabul," she says. In 2017, she'd joined an organization in the capital city which focused on advocating for human rights - women's rights - and on creating "a platform to share our histories through our art. So my advocacy journey began back in 2017 when I joined ArtLords."
Of her trajectory, she says, when the Taliban took over, she soon fled Afghanistan to Albania, where she spent almost seven months in a camp before coming to the U.S. to join her younger sister and to start building "our new life in our new community."
Hearing that her friend, Ziagul, had been involved in the Two Daughters podcast project piqued her interest "because there haven't been many opportunities for other people to know about our country, about our histories."
Azimi saw the series as a good means of offering such an opportunity for area people to become better acquainted with the refugee community.
Of the project, she says, "at the first, honestly, I didn't think that women would be willing to share their stories, but they were so brave - [brave] enough to talk so openly."
Saying she's honored to be "a small part of this project," she hopes her peers' stories will be "an inspiration for others, for our new community to get closer together."
Because Azimi had a fairly high-profile life in Afghanistan - "my picture, my interviews were all over -published inside my country" - it "was very hard for me to erase all of that." So in Brattleboro, "I didn't use any alternative name for my interviews or for my picture."
While some women in the series were agreeable to using their name, others were not. Some declined having photos taken that would show their faces, on the strong advice of personnel from the School for International Training and the ECDC who have been involved in the refugee resettlement effort.
In the first months of the resettlement here, those working with the refugees gave a number of reasons to avoid media, citing potential danger to relatives still in Afghanistan to potential risk to the refugees' long process of getting legal status.
"Each individual had to think about what they wanted to do and their reasons for doing it," Sutton explains.
Other subjects in the podcast, says Azimi, have used "alternative names for the interviews or they just skipped their pictures being published," for reasons of safety and security.
An uncertain future
All refugees in the Brattleboro area hold refugee status and/or have been granted asylum. "Some have already gotten their green cards," says Sutton. "They have followed every legal requirement that they were supposed to. And they were brought here by the U.S."
Inevitably, questions about security surface in response to Washington-initiated actions against refugees and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's statement issued on May 12.
"We've reviewed the conditions in Afghanistan with our interagency partners, and they do not meet the requirements for a TPS [Temporary Protected Status] designation," Noem said. "Afghanistan has had an improved security situation, and its stabilizing economy no longer" prevents Afghans from returning to their home country.
Azimi responds to that perceived security and whether it is, indeed, safe for Afghans to return to their country of origin despite it still being under the rule of a violent militant group.
"I think someone should ask the Homeland Security office what the definition of safety for them there is. [...] Safety doesn't mean that you could just live there. Even today, they can't live freely there," she says.
"There's gender apartheid going. Women cannot work or go out. Even there's no work for men," Azimi continues. "They cannot supply for their families. And there are all other issues that the media cannot cover" because of Taliban control.
"We cannot go to our country at this time," she concludes.
When she and fellow refugees first came to the U.S., Azimi says, they were placed temporarily and from there assigned the state in which they'd take up permanent residency. When she and her cohort heard they'd be settling in Vermont, they were puzzled: None had heard of it.
"We thought that maybe it's not inside the United States," she says. "And everyone went and searched for the name of Vermont on Google and asked 'where is it?'"
Finally here, Azimi recalls beings struck by "all of these beautiful trees." Acknowledging the surprise of the weather, geography, spaciousness, and nature, she says they settled in well.
"I think we are very adaptable people," Azimi says.
All along, she says, Vermont has been very supportive of refugees. She understands that "it's now a very difficult situation all over the country, and Vermont wants to play its role very cautiously" while preserving and sharing its values with the refugee community.
"Vermont, it's beautiful," Azimi adds: "I think the warmness and love and support of this community is the big reason that all families are so eager to live here and build their lives here" - and maybe buy a house or land to build on, not only for this generation, but for the next, she hopes.
"I know other families in other states are requesting to come to Vermont because they feel safe here," Azimi says.
Making it all possible
Azimi's story is one of so many, several of which have been captured by Pine and Sutton - and a cluster of facilitating support.
The initial $12,000 grant for their project came through Vermont Public's Made Here Fund, founded in 2022 to broaden and diversify Vermont storytelling.
Pine and Sutton submitted other grant applications and soon garnered support from Vermont Humanities ($5,000), The Windham Foundation ($5,000), and the Brattleboro Town Arts Fund (Arts Council of Windham County).
While Pine and Sutton are volunteers; the grants allowed the project to pay Azimi, Ziagul, and voiceover actors, as well as Dave Snyder of Guilford Sound, who mastered the sound.
Two Daughters also acknowledge photographer Elizabeth Ungerleider and designer Tekla McInerney.
For more information about The Afghan Women of Brattleboro, including streaming audio, a complete description of each episode, and a transcript, visit afghanwomenofbrattleboro.org. The program is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast directories.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.