Resettled In Annapolis, But True To Afganistan
Every morning, Fahima Vorgetts walks up to the door of a small shop in the shadow of Maryland’s State House and turns the key. Here on a Colonial-era stone-paved street populated by chic antique stores and art galleries, the 51-year-old Afghan immigrant enters a chipped okra-green door and vicariously returns to a world she left behind 27 years ago.
Beyond the threshold, in a long corridor about 15 by 120 feet, lies a small corner of Afghanistan. Kaleidoscopically colored rugs from Afghan and other Central Asian markets blanket the floors, dangle from the ceiling and stand rolled along the corridor’s entire length. On the shop’s counters, ornate handcrafted earrings, stone-studded necklaces and oversize rings show off a dazzling array of color and artistry.
Vorgetts opened Aaryana Imports in downtown Annapolis in 2000. Since then, Vorgetts said, she has funneled profits from her shoebox-size business — as well as money gained from fundraising efforts — back to the villages and schools of her home country.
Vorgetts fled Afghanistan in 1979, the year the Soviet Union invaded. She was 25. With a newly earned chemistry degree from the University of Kabul, she went to Switzerland to do scientific research. In 1990 she moved to the United States. Here she began to focus on what she calls her passion: providing the dispossessed widows and orphans of her country with literacy education, vocational training and health care. While a single mother of two in Northern Virginia, she fell in love with an American scientist who lived in Annapolis. They were married and settled there in 1995.
In 2002, after 23 years away from home, she began making regular trips to her country 10,000 miles away, taking medical supplies, clothing, computers and other necessities to women and families in need. Vorgetts’s eyes water when she recalls how members of her family were killed over the course of 20 years of civil war and occupation. Some died at the hands of the Soviets and members of the Taliban, but the overwhelming majority were slain by the warlords called mujaheddin.
“I still see all my first cousins, all the ones who died, in my dreams,” she says, pushing her fingers into her chest as if to keep her stormy emotions in check.
An instant later, the memory of orphans in the 60,000-strong refugee camp she visited this year on the Afghan-Pakistani border flashes across her mind. “And I see in my dreams the women and children I visited in the camps, and I ask myself, ‘What can I do to help them?’ ”
Vorgetts, who became a U.S. citizen in 1997, began forging a support network at home and abroad. In Annapolis, she is an honorary member of the local Rotary Club, which has lent financial aid to build a well in Afghanistan. She has raised money with Anne Arundel Peace Action, and she coordinates volunteers to work with the Afghan Women’s Fund, a U.S.-based organization. For construction of a 1,200-student school in Herat in western Afghanistan, Vorgetts has raised $75,000.
“People come to my store to volunteer. Retired people, electricians, nurses, professors, they all want to help. But first we need to establish a training center in Kabul where people can be assured of lodging and security.”
Vorgetts has begun arranging for American schools and universities to “adopt” sister schools in Afghanistan. She is contacting Annapolis area schools to see if they are interested. And she continues to seek individual or group sponsors for orphans in Afghanistan at a cost of $50 a month.
Her humanitarianism is punctuated at times by biting political commentary.
“Afghanistan today is a country where 25 million people are the hostages of a few hundred thousand men — the mujaheddin, the warlords,” she says.
Vorgetts awaits a new day for Afghanistan. In the meantime, the small whirlwind of a woman says she will continue her pilgrimages to her homeland, with an assist from the people of her new home.
“A lot of people in Annapolis want to help,” she said.
Washington Post
6 July 2006
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/2006/07/05/AR2006070500425.html