S5E10: Afghanistan

Mariam: Hey, Sajjad. So you're from Idaho, right?

Sajjad: Yeah, I am.

Mariam: So I've heard a lot about the potatoes there. Are they any better? Do they taste better in Idaho? Like, what's the deal with the potato situation there?

Sajjad: I'm not going to lie. I personally have never seen a potato field, but I will say the French fries there are pretty good. I don't know if that's universal everywhere.

Mariam: So you're saying that when I go to Idaho, get the French fries?

Sajjad: Get the French fries.

Mariam: Cool. All right. I'll keep that in mind.

Well, hello, everybody. This is Mariam. Welcome to "Bundle of Hers." I am super, super excited today because we are going to be talking about a very special topic that's near and dear to my heart. Technically, every week, we talk about a very special topic, but this one really hits close to home. The episode today is titled "Afghanistan."

For those of you who have listened to my assimilation episode, I talked a lot about my experiences being part Afghan with recent things happening, especially in Kabul. You're seeing a lot of stuff on the news.

I really wanted to give more space and more of a platform for other Afghans, for us to kind of talk about who Afghans are, what Afghanistan is, and kind of give more to the story than what we're seeing in the media.

So I'm super, super excited to be able to introduce two guest speakers to our episode today, Sajjad and Lilly. And I'm going to actually let them introduce themselves and how we know each other.

Lilly: I can go first. Thanks, Mariam. I'm super excited to be here. My name is Lilly Kanishka, and I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. Both of my parents are refugees from Kabul, Afghanistan, and they came here over 30 years ago. But I've grown up in this 30-mile radius my whole life, and I'm currently a second-year medical student at the University of Utah.

Sajjad: I am from Kabul, Afghanistan. I was born and raised kind of. I was there for about two years, and then we moved to Pakistan shortly after. I was there until I was about 6, and then my family decided to make the move out here due to a number of reasons. But I grew up mainly in Boise, Idaho, and then I came here for medical school.

Mariam: I'm super excited to have you guys on this show. And I don't know about you guys, but when I found out that there were two other Afghans in my class first year, I kind of freaked out because I've never had a situation where there are other Afghans. I've never been around that community. And so this is a very special moment for me, and I'm so glad that we were able to do this.

Last year was the pandemic. Well, the pandemic is still going strong, let's be real. But everything was remote. We didn't have the vaccine then. So we really didn't get a chance to connect. And I was just curious, Sajjad, what was your experience balancing medical school and kind of just having this background?

Sajjad: Honestly, when I came to Utah, or Salt Lake City specifically, I guess, I had a very hopeful approach for it and I had this vision in my head of how things were going to go and how things were going to be. I'm coming from Boise, which is a smaller city to Salt Lake City, which is a bigger city. We've got an NBA team, the city, and all this stuff to do.

Obviously, at the time, COVID wasn't a thing when I was getting ready and thinking about all this. And then COVID hit and I'm like, "Okay, it's no worries. It'll pass and everything will be fine." Here I find myself in medical school and COVID is full-blown. Everything is virtual. And I'm sitting there like, "How am I supposed to meet people in this brand new city? I don't know anybody here."

The only connections I had at the time were my roommates who were also in medical school, which . . . I mean, you could imagine how much medical school you want in your life. Having your friends and everybody else around you also in medical school kind of makes things a little bit redundant and just you get more stressed.

It was tough. I'm not going to lie. I had a very tough time adapting to the medical school environment, especially given the new city on top of COVID. Do I think it would have been as bad if COVID wasn't a thing? Maybe, but I obviously don't know.

But when I learned that there were other Afghans in my class . . . which you guys have already alluded to. You guys have never heard that before either, which is a common theme because I have never had that either. In Boise, there's an Afghan community, but I was never in classes with them for some reason. Either I was older or younger or whatever.

But coming here and then there's two in my medical school class? I was just mind-blown. I was like, "This is amazing." And just to have this sense of community has been extremely powerful.

Mariam: Okay. Wait, wait, wait. But be honest, Sajjad. When you found out there were two Afghans in your class . . .

Lilly: Were you that excited?

Mariam: No, he was.

Sajjad: I'm being serious. I was very excited.

Mariam: He was excited. So the reason I'm bringing this up, Sajjad, do you remember our first interaction?

Sajjad: Yes, of course I remember this because I was so excited. I reached out to both of you. I don't know who was first. But I reached out to both of you. I was like, "Oh my gosh. Hey, you're Afghan too?" And then it was such a dry response, like, "Yes." I'm like, "Oh, all right."

Mariam: That is not true. You know what it was? We thought about this. I was not dry. I was so kind. I was like, "So are you from here?" And you're like, "No, I'm from Idaho." "Oh, cool. What part of Idaho?" And you're like, "Boise. I really like the mountains here." And I was like, "Cool, cool." And then you were like, "Where can I get good Afghan food?" And I was like, "Go to this place." And you were like, "Sounds good," and that was it. And I was like, "Okay."

Sajjad: Wow, you really went back and found the . . .

Lilly: She's calling you out.

Mariam: I did. I found my receipts. You said that I wasn't friendly, and I was very friendly. I gave you two Afghan recommendations. They were the only Afghan restaurants in Salt Lake, but I gave you those two recommendations.

Lilly: I will call out Sajjad too, because I was studying with all of his roommates, and he was like, "Oh, I should come study with you all sometime." And I was like, "Yeah, you should." And he never did. I was like, "Okay, he's too cool to be friends with us, I guess. But it's fine."

Sajjad: That is not true.

Mariam: We say this with a lot of love, by the way.

Lilly: Yeah.

Mariam: This is probably something people should know. Afghans are like this. We give each other a lot of crap, and it's fine at the end of the day.

Lilly: It's all endearing.

Mariam: It's all endearing. Sajjad, are we being too mean to you?

Sajjad: No. I actually love this. I'm so used to this. It's a roast session every time.

Mariam: I think last year was really hard to connect for obvious reasons, but I think because we're not used to having that level of community, it was a little bit intimidating to reach . . . At least on my part, it was a little bit intimidating to reach out at first because . . . I don't know.

Lilly, we were talking about this earlier, and you were like, "I'm usually the only Afghan." I can relate to that, and that makes me a little bit sad because I think in this "diaspora" that we have, I feel like sometimes we feel so isolated in it.

Growing up in the city that I grew up in, we were the only Afghans in that city. And that's just kind of a common theme I think for a lot of different Afghans. Unless you grew up in the Fremont area, right? Or in L.A. or some of those bigger cities. There are Afghan hubs for sure. But I think sometimes it takes us a while to find our people, but I'm so glad that I found you guys.

Sajjad: Same. And obviously, I could have reached out more, which I didn't. I think it goes back to just growing up, my parents were always very weird about my relationships with other Afghans for a number of reasons. Just kind of how the culture is in terms of just relationships between different Afghans and different families.

And growing up in Boise, it was a pretty big, I guess, Afghan community. But my parents always encouraged me to not be friends with the other Afghans. And they encouraged me to kind of pursue my relationships with Americans and everybody else.

I imagine this for a number of reasons just because . . . I mean, when we moved here, we moved here in August. It was August of 2001. Let that sink in for a little bit. Just a month later, it was 9/11. And I just remember at that time I had no idea what was going on. I was like 7, 6 years old, and then all of a sudden my parents are freaking out and all this stuff is going on. I'm like, "What is happening?"

And then all of a sudden my parents were just saying all these things, like, "Hey, you were born here. Tell everyone you were born here. You're not Afghan. You're not Muslim. You're not this." It was just crazy to me. I imagine you guys went through similar experiences.

Lilly: It's kind of traumatizing looking back at it because we really had to hide a lot of our identity. I remember my mom would always put Ayatul Kursi in our car, which is basically a scripture that's supposed to keep you safe when you travel. And I remember her taking it down from our car, and I was just so upset because I was like, "Mom, why? How are we going to be safe when we're driving around?" And she was like, "Someone is going to break the glass in our car and get really angry if they see that, and they might think something bad about us."

And it really upset me, but almost going full circle from there, I remember the entire first half of our first year, my mom would always . . . Every single time I called her and I would ask her how everyone was and she would ask me how I was doing, every single time after I mentioned it the first time, she would be like, "How is that Afghan boy and that Afghan girl in your class?" She forgets all of my friends' names and everything I tell her. She never really remembers anything. But she would always ask about that.

And I'd always feel so guilty because I'd be like, "Mom, I don't know. I don't know them. I don't know how they're doing." And my mom was like, "You have to talk to them. You have to check in on them. You only have each other there and you need to make sure they're doing okay, and you're all in this together." And I was just like, "Okay, Mom. Whatever." But then the more I thought about it, the more I was like, "No, you're right."

I got really used to having that community of my family in school or being around my cousins. And when you're in med school, it's so isolating that being able to just talk about how we grew up, it's this nostalgia. It makes me feel happy being able to share that with you all.

Mariam: Yeah. I feel like when I'm in med school, I am just a different person. The way that I present myself, I act so different. I'm not my authentic self with people, and I think that's for a lot of different reasons.

Thinking about it, without you guys, would I have talked about being Afghan? Probably not as much. And it's not to say that I wouldn't have felt comfortable in my identity. It's something that you share. An identity is something that you share and experience with other people too. I think that's what has made med school a little bit more worthwhile, is to be able to share that with you guys.

Sajjad: My parents encouraging me not to tell people that I was Afghan and all this kind of stuff, I did that for a while, so probably throughout grade school. Then early middle school, around sixth grade, I started to think to myself . . . because I started to meet people that weren't white Americans, and I started making friends that were of other races and other cultures.

And I found it very peculiar to me that they were so proud of the culture that they were from and where their roots were, and that, I think, inspired me in a lot of ways because I then stopped telling people that I was American, or whatever it was. I started telling people, "No, I'm Afghan. I am from Afghanistan. I was born there. I grew up here, but I know Farsi." I started to really embrace who I was. And to me, at that time, it was very empowering.

But after that, I started getting more of a negative reaction from a lot of the people around me. Not the ones that were, obviously, culturally diverse. We stayed within ourselves and we had our own little community.

But people had . . . they would do it in a joking way, but my nickname for a long time was "Terrorist." They would refer to me as . . . I'd be on a school bus, and other kids would be like, "Hey, whose house are you bombing today?" Comments like that. It started happening after I expressed where I was from and who I was. And it made me realize, "Okay, my parents were trying to protect me from this."

And the fact that they had to do that, to protect us who were growing up here, and they kind of just intrinsically knew that was going on, it made me realize that it was probably happening to them too. They went to work and they were doing all these things.

And then later on, I started asking my parents about that stuff and they started telling us stories, that yeah, they had experienced all this kind of racism, this stuff that was going on that I was so blind to for so long. Then I started realizing that it was an actual predominant thing.

Mariam: That makes me feel sad too, because when I think about it, it makes you feel even more disconnected from the culture and it makes you lose sight of all of the just valuable, beautiful things that we grow up with.

There were times where I had moments of shame, and you don't ever think about those things, right? You just think about, "How do I stay safe?" That's why I think it's so crucial when we talk about Afghanistan . . . It's so much more than just what is shown on like TV, right? Generally, what does it mean to you to be Afghan?

Lilly: I guess when I think about what being Afghan means to me and what Afghanistan represents for me, a lot of it has to do with just resilience, especially when my parents tell me stories about how they moved and packed up everything that they had.

There are a lot of themes that I've just sensed, especially my mom and my dad. Whether it was my mom saying that she packed everything that she had into her pockets, and she left her country with only the clothes that she was wearing, nothing to change into, nothing to be a memoir from her home, and just moved to a completely different country where she didn't speak their language, and she learned Urdu while she was staying in India for three years, to my dad who came to America and he lived in Germany. And in every country he went to, he tried to become fluent as quickly as possible in those languages so that he could get a job, and he could pay his rent, and he could start to build a foundation for himself.

There's something about visualizing Afghanistan as a Phoenix, and it gets burned down over and over again. I feel like our people always rise from those ashes, whether it's literal ashes and a lot of loss and a lot of sadness in our country to a completely different country where the soil is new and the food is new. I think that they're always able to adapt and survive. And that's something that I definitely carry with me and hope that I can embody too.

I think that growing up in Utah, since I never really moved out of state and I've always been in this bubble, I got really used to assimilating to the culture around me. And so I think, for me, it was difficult to stay really connected to Afghan culture outside of the home just because I didn't really see it around me.

But then when I was home, my parents were very much like, "We want you to be grounded in your culture. We want you to know your language and understand your traditions."

So at home, my dad would always say that he doesn't know English, and he'd force me to talk to him in Farsi. So I would start telling him a story in English, and I'd get halfway through, and he'd be like, "I don't know what you're saying. You have to talk in Farsi to me."

I was annoyed at the time, but now I'm really appreciative because I think Farsi is really hard to learn as an adult, so I'm glad I was forced to learn it at home and retain that.

But I think going to school was really difficult because I was a lot darker compared to my classmates, and I definitely stood out in grade school. And especially when everything happened with the 9/11, I was in, I think, kindergarten or first grade.

I didn't really understand exactly what was going on, but I do remember going to school that week and my mom dropping me off and she sat in the car with me and told me, "If anyone asks you where you're from, just say you're from here, that you're American. And if they ask you what religion you are, just say you don't have one." "Don't say anything more than you need to," basically. "Just try to fit in and go under the radar."

And for me, I was really confused because I didn't really know what that meant until I heard rhetoric in my classes and children saying really mean things and not understanding why they felt that way about me or my people.

And so I think growing up in Utah, I definitely learned to hide my identity and to keep it at home and to celebrate my culture and my traditions with my family. But then when I went outside, I very much felt like I needed to be the perfect representation of what it meant to be an American and to speak really perfect English. I was ESL growing up, so my parents would make me watch "Power Rangers" on TV to learn English.

Mariam: Now that you mention that, I'm just now remembering. We have this thing . . . I think it's called the "Look Book." And essentially what it is, is every first-year medical student gets this book of pictures and fun facts about all of our classmates. And so I was stalking the "Look Book" and I saw Lilly's picture and I was like, "She could be Afghan." I got the Afghan sense, right?

Lilly: The little tingle.

Mariam: The little tingle. And then I looked at the back and I looked at the fun fact, and she was like, "Fun fact: I learned English by watching 'Power Rangers.'" And I think she mentioned she spoke Farsi. And I flipped out. I was like, "I'm going to be her friend." I think that's how the friendship began.

So the first time I ever sat in a meeting with Lilly, we were going around introducing ourselves and somebody was like, "Tell us something interesting about you."

And I was like, "Hi. My name is Mariam, and I'm Afghan." I looked straight at Lilly, and I was like, "She better say, 'I'm Afghan too.'" And then you started clapping on the Zoom.

I just remember distinctly because I was like, "Oh my God. This never happens." At least for me it was so rare to have this, and it sounds like it was for you, Lilly.

Sajjad, I'm kind of curious because you were born in Kabul. You lived in Pakistan for a while. Did you come to Idaho right after that?

Sajjad: No. So initially, it was Virginia and we were there for a little bit, for a short time, because we had some family there. And then we moved to Idaho after that. So I mainly grew up in Boise, Idaho.

But to answer your question about what being Afghan means to me . . . First of all, with Lilly, a lot of stuff you said I can relate to so much on it. I was racking my brain because I thought about what it means to be Afghan, and I was like, "I can explain it in a . . ." Actually, I could probably show it rather than explain it, but then I was really thinking about it.

There's this experience that I had with my uncle that really kind of made me like, "Oh, yeah, that is definitely what Afghan means to me."

So he came and visited one time. He was an engineer in Kabul. And they're very well-respected, engineers, doctors, certain . . . for obvious reasons. And he came and I remember we had . . . I think it was a smoke detector or something that wasn't working. And he basically said, "Go get the smoke detector."

So I went and got it. I gave it to him. He took it apart. I don't even know what he did in a matter of three minutes. He took it apart, put it back together. He was like, "Put it back onto the ceiling," and I did. He's like, "Go test it." And I tested it and it worked.

I was like, "How did you do that?" And he said, "[foreign language 00:18:47]." And I was like, "Okay." And at that time I was young. I didn't really know what he meant. And then nowadays, I look back, when he said "[foreign language 00:18:56]," what he's saying is, "Son, I'm Afghan." And that's kind of a saying that a lot of Afghans use.

And it made me realize that there's this ingrained pride and just innovation and ability to just learn and do things in a way that's very unique to most things that I've ever experienced in my life.

I've never gone anywhere else and experienced something like that where he just knew exactly what to do. And it's probably in a culmination of all the experiences he's had growing up fixing things around the house and kind of intuitively gaining this knowledge.

And it also gave me this insight as to the perseverance and just the amount of things that Afghans have had to work against them. They've had multiple wars, multiple problems within their own countries. It seems like every 5 to 10 years another country is trying to take over. That has ingrained this pride and then this perseverance to maintain themselves and still hold themselves to a respectable place.

Now that I look back and hearing that phrase, I'm like, "Okay, I see what that means." It's honestly very empowering just knowing that so many people and so many Afghans out there have that sense of pride. That essentially is what being Afghan means to me.

Mariam: I love hearing you guys' perspectives, because I think there's a similar trend. I think we all have a lot of pride at how resilient our people are. But also it's so interesting to hear about the differences too.

I talked about this a little bit in my assimilation episode. I talked about how I grew up and was raised and things like that. But something I didn't mention . . . For me, my parents, obviously, it wasn't always safe to say that we were Afghan or we were Middle Eastern. Depending on where we were at, there was a lot of racism, things like that.

But the ways that I learned about Afghanistan actually came from the nighttime. And what I mean by that is when I was little, I was such a scaredy-cat. I couldn't sleep by myself. So I would run over to my mom's room. I would lay in her bed and I'd be like, "Mom, tell me a story. Tell me a story." And she'd be like, "Okay, I'm going to tell you a story, and then you need to go to bed."

But then she would stay up for hours, and she would tell me about when she was a little girl. And so I would hear about Afghanistan just through those narratives.

And she never talked to me about Afghanistan when she was dropping me off at school or even at dinner, but it was always during those special times, late at night when I was a scaredy-cat and I would go to her room.

There were so many different stories that she would tell. There were stories of going to Kandahar and getting the best pomegranate she's ever had.

Sajjad: Pomegranate.

Lilly: Yes.

Mariam: Or going on picnics. Beautiful stories like that, end even some really funny tongue-in-cheek stories.

Oh my gosh, she's going to be so mad at me for saying this. But the one time that . . . My mom was kind of a sassy teenager, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. She brought a candle to school and she lit it, and then she burned his beard with it.

I think when I think about Afghanistan on the one hand . . . Again, what I mentioned. From the beginning, we're taught this narrative of, "Oh, it's a war-torn country." But then remembering from childhood those stories that my mom would share with me of just growing up and different beautiful little things that shaped my mindset of who Afghans are and what Afghanistan is as a country.

Lilly: I love that you talked about how sassy your mom is because . . .

Mariam: My mom is going to kill me if she listens to this.

Lilly: My mom was the same way. I'd always be like, "Mom, why are you wearing such high heels?" And she'd be like, "In Afghanistan, I always had a fresh perm. I always wore hot pink hoops. I always had high heels, my nails done. Who do you think I was? My dad was a pharmacist. We had a reputation to uphold." And I was like, "Oh, okay, Mom. I can't even walk in heels, but . . ."

Sajjad: Yeah, I think that's really good insight because it makes me think about all the stories that my parents shared with me as well. You can tell how much pride they have for their own country just from the stories that they tell. My dad and mom always talked about how beautiful of a country it was, how education was amazing.

A lot of people have these thoughts about Afghanistan, countries like that, where women can't get education. I mean, I'm sure you guys can speak on it too. But yeah, my mom got a medical education. She was a medical doctor there. She was an OBGYN. She always talked about how she had wonderful teachers and she learned a lot.

And the stories that my dad would share about his upbringing and kite flying and all this stuff. I don't know. I think it's just amazing to know that there were such awesome experiences that our parents went through that we can kind of vicariously experience through them just from their stories.

Mariam: Yeah. I think Afghans are just natural storytellers. I'm just going to go on a limb and say they're the best storytellers. I don't know if this is the case for you guys, but every time my family gets together, we just tell stories. And that's kind of the best and most beautiful part of our culture, at least for me. It's hearing those stories.

And especially when things are really hard. I think when people just think of Afghanistan in a single narrative, it's just important to go back to that level of humanity and go back to challenging some of those stereotypes that come out of some of the Western dialogue.

You both mentioned earlier both of your moms were in the healthcare sphere. In Kabul, my mom was in pharmacy school just like Lilly's mom. And a lot of people are surprised to hear that, that women get educations, that women had careers, were able to do these things. But I think that just kind of goes to show the importance of us talking about these things.

I think it's our generation's responsibility to kind of bring back that narrative. Because at the end of the day, they're going to always want to take that narrative away from us. They're going to always want to justify war. They're always going to want to justify colonizing and taking over and occupying certain lands. But at the end of the day, we have to bring humanity back to that region.

Lilly: I can resonate so much with everything that you both said, which is not something I can commonly say with people. But I remember, growing up, I myself consumed a lot of Western media and culture. And so all of the visualizations I had of Afghanistan was what I saw on the news and what I saw on TV.

It wasn't until I got older that my parents got this cable box called Jadoo where you could watch . . .

Sajjad: Jadoo.

Lilly: We all have Jadoos. My parents have like five in their house because new generations come out. Do you know when you'd put a satellite on your roof? That's what my parents have so that they could watch Afghan television.

But they would play this all day, every day. And at first, it was background noise, but then I would watch it with my parents while we were cooking dinner or having dinner.

And I started to realize that a lot of the things that I see in Western media just aren't portrayed accurately about Afghanistan, whether it's in the past or even currently. I remember myself being like, "Whoa, Dad, they have these huge apartment buildings and banks in Afghanistan?" And my dad would be like, "What do you think?" And I was like, "I don't know."

I started to realize that I had all of these biases that have been just placed in front of me that I've just been seeing a lot. And I remember when I started to share images of Afghanistan and pictures of Afghanistan, a lot of my friends were saying that they never knew that Afghanistan looked like that. They never realized that we had buildings and shops and women wore skirts and makeup and worked.

It was so sad because my parents lived during this time. They experienced all those things. And yet, here I was seeing a completely different version of that.

And I remember talking to my grandpa a lot because he was a pharmacist, and he was really well known in his village, and everyone just loved him. He inspired my mom to become a pharmacist.

I remember I would be drawing and my mom would come sit next to me and she would take out a notebook. And she drew this perfectly accurate and precise anatomical sketch of a person. It was like something you would see in your Netter's book when you're studying anatomy. And it blew my mind because I had no idea that my mom just knew anatomy that well and understood all the intricacies of it.

And I remember in her dressers, she would have books and books full of pharmacy books and medication books. And I saw pictures of her wearing white coats and in the pharmacy lab.

She told me how she would make medications. And she worked a full-time job wearing heels, and her and all her co-workers would make baked goods and they'd make chai, and they'd drink tea together during their breaks.

It really opened my eyes to exactly how my parents grew up and what Afghanistan actually looks like and how little we see of that on the other side.

Mariam: I love this. I'm so glad that we had the opportunity to do this. If there's one thing you want people to leave with today, what do you want people to know about Afghanistan?

Sajjad: I would say that Afghanistan is more than the country the West and the U.S. decided to go to war with. Afghanistan is more than just what it has become today. It's more than just what the media portrays it to be.

I think if most people took the time and just the opportunity to talk to someone who is Afghan or gets to learn a little bit more about the culture about Afghanistan, they will learn that it is so deep rooted, and it goes so far back, and there's such beauty and intricacies involved with it, just like there is in many cultures.

But I feel like I have to say this because it's been tainted, honestly, by Western media and a lot of how things have been portrayed. I mean, based on the stories that I've shared and we all have talked about today, it should be obvious. And I just want people to take away from this that, yes, we are more than just what has been portrayed. Take the time to get to know us and get to know the country. You won't be disappointed.

Lilly: I think, for me, I really hope that people take away the value and belief of Afghan people. When I think of Afghanistan, I hope other people think of this too, but I think of an unlocked front door because your neighbor could come in at any point and want to have chai with you or want to borrow ingredients to cook with from you and feeling safe in leaving that door unlocked because you know that they're a friend of yours.

And when I think of Afghanistan, and I hope other people think about, I hope that they think about very . . . I hope that they think about a very community-based country where we rise by lifting others and we focus on taking care of our neighbors and our brothers and our sisters.

And I think about all the times that my parents had nothing and yet they would give whatever they had to someone else. Or whenever my mom would make us dinner, she would make sure that we got the most portions and she would eat whatever was left. I think that that's what I hope people think about.

Our culture is so rich with the idea of caring about one another and not wanting to take anything from someone, but wanting to give others so much. I think that I really learned that from my parents and I hope to embody that more. But I hope that people see that more.

Mariam: Yeah. So beautifully said. Thank you both so much.

If there's anything I want to leave with people about Afghanistan . . . I think we've touched on so much of it, but one last thing I will say, our food is so dope. After this episode, go get some Afghan food. Really experience the culture.

Talk to Afghans. Listen to their experiences. It is important to hear their experiences of difficulty and their experiences as refugees, but allow them the space to also celebrate their culture and kind of talk about what's important to them and their background.

So with that said, thank you guys both so much for being on this episode, and thank you to our audience for listening.

If you want to catch more episodes of "Bundle of Hers," please follow us on wherever you get your podcasts. Spotify? That's where you get podcasts, right? The Podcast app on my phone is typically where I go, on my iPhone. Or you can follow us on Instagram @bundleofhers.

Thank you all so much, and we'll see you next time.