‘My Cousin’s Life Is in Danger’: Panel Discussion on Women and Girls in Afghanistan Set for Tuesday

Prompted by her own cousin Sodaba Wakili’s dire situation in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and an ongoing effort to get her out, New Canaan resident Shekaiba Bennett has organized a free panel discussion scheduled for 7 p.m. Tuesday at New Canaan Library (register here). The panel, titled “Women & Girls in Afghanistan: Listen, Learn, Act,” wil be moderated by New Canaan’s Sheri West, founder of LiveGirl, and will include town resident and attorney Alexis Brooks, among others. 

We put some questions to Bennett ahead of the panel. Here’s our exchange.

New Canaanite: What is the genesis of Tuesday night’s panel discussion “Women & Girls in Afghanistan: Listen, Learn, Act”?

Shekaiba Bennett: New Canaanites are quite worldly and often express concern to me, likely the only Afghan-American living in town, about the status of women and girls in Afghanistan, especially since the 2021 Taliban take over. They are deeply concerned about the erasure of womens’ rights, and access to school for girls. 

Tell me about your cousin. Describe your relationship with her and what are you hearing from her about what’s happening on the ground to women in Afghanistan? 

Sodaba Wakili. Photo courtesy of Shekaiba Bennett

My cousin, Sodaba Wakili is the youngest of my female cousins. We have a sisterly relationship, speaking with each other several times per month. From her experience, the loss of rights and degradation of society has been like a mudslide, starting immediately after the U.S. withdrawal. It continues at a dizzying pace today. As an urban, sophisticated, and educated young woman, she, like millions of women, has faced harsh restrictions. She called me scared and in tears when the Taliban twice searched her house at gunpoint, ransacking her room, going through her closet, ripping up her art work. She tells about gender apartheid that is happening to Afghan women. She has lost her job working as an executive director of a women’s organization. On her way home from an Art class, the taxi was pulled over at gunpoint and both the driver and her threatened  for not having a male chaperone. She was studying at Kabul University for her Masters Degree in Social work when the Taliban banned all women from higher education. When she was brave enough to leave the house to meet friends at a cafe (sitting only  in the womens’ section), she was followed home by the Taliban morality police. This intimidation has made her leave the house even less. Since the Taliban take over of Afghanistan, Afghan women have faced: a travel ban, a strictly-enforced Arabian-style dress code which covers the body head to toe including the face, gender segregation, women and girls banned from all sports, women must be chaperoned by a male guardian while visiting health-care facilities and only see women doctors, women banned from appearing on TV, all beauty parlors forced to close, shopkeepers ordered to remove women mannequins, women banned from using gyms,  bathhouses and parks, and all local and foreign nongovernmental organizations banned from employing Afghan women.

What steps have you taken to secure a U.S. visa for your cousin and what has the response been like from our representatives in Washington, D.C.?

In September of 2021, I filed an application for a Humanitarian Parole visa for Sodaba. The Biden Administration designated these visas for Afghan people. I paid the $575 fee and gave USCIS—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services—my entire financial history. To date, I have received a receipt for her application and nothing else. I have contacted the offices of Congressman Jim Himes, Senator Richard Blumenthal, and Senator Chris Murphy. All three have replied with the same answer: Sodaba’s case is pending. Humanitarian visas are intended to help people get out of dire situations. The same program was used more recently to help Ukranians endangered by the war there. I don’t know why the U.S. government is seemingly sitting on these cases and why there’s such slow progress on approving Afghan cases, especially Afghan women’s cases. My cousin’s life is in danger every day that she is in Afghanistan.

This is clearly a deeply personal situation for you, Shekaiba. Tuesday’s panel is to be moderated by a fellow New Canaanite in Sheri West and includes yet another New Canaanite in attorney Alexis Brooks. Please talk about their advocacy and work, as well as what attendees can expect on Tuesday night.

Tuesday night’s panel is moderated by Sheri West, CEO and founder of LiveGirl. Sheri is a womens’ and girls’ rights activist. She and I coordinated with the New Canaan library to bring this talk to our community. On the panel, will be New Canaanite attorney Alexis Brooks. She’s working pro bono on 14 humanitarian parole cases for an organization in California. She secured funding for the application fees for those 14 cases from the UN Committee of New Canaan. Joining via Zoom will be best selling author Nadia Hashimi, co-founder of the Afghan American Foundation. The Afghan American Foundation is a national non-profit organization representing the interests of Afghans and Afghan-Americans through advocacy, research, education, and community engagement. Since August 2021, they have been advocating for the passing of the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bill that provides a path to permanent residency for more than 70,000 Afghans paroled to the United States and the wake of the US withdrawal of Afghanistan. The bill has still not been passed. Sodaba Wakili will also be joining via a prerecorded Zoom interview. She will speak about her life in Afghanistan.

What else would you like to say about your cousin, about what’s happening in Afghanistan or about “Women & Girls in Afghanistan: Listen, Learn, Act”?

My hope is that the audience in Tuesday’s talk leaves with a better understanding of the humanitarian crisis that is taking place in Afghanistan, with most of the country teetering on the edge of a famine. I’m hoping that the audience takes action by asking our representatives to put pressure on the Taliban to return Afghan women to the workforce and education. Finally, I hope that our audience puts pressure on our representatives to get USCIS to approve Afghan humanitarian parole cases.