Keeping Our Promise
Ellen Smith devotes her time to helping refugees resettle in the Rochester area, especially Afghan interpreters who helped American troops during the war
By John Addyman
Two years ago, President Biden ordered U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan. Quickly. When the Afghanistan army melted away, the country was left to the Taliban, who flooded out of the darkness to take over.
And the image that grates with us is of people desperate to leave Kabul on a plane — running down the runway with it, trying to hold onto a piece of the jet aircraft to be lifted away when it took off.
Those people were frightened of what the Taliban would do to them because they had provided some service to Americans — interpreters, cooks, office help, civic employees. People left behind knew the Taliban would hunt them down and not just kill someone, but eliminate families, as if they’d never existed.
America had promised hope and a new, improved Afghanistan, then wrought disaster.
In Rochester, people had been working since well before the fall of Afghanistan to bring to America people whose service to U.S. interests and military had made them targets in their homeland. The process was filled with red tape and delays. But the money to support it had to come from all kinds of sources.
Ellen Smith, 63, from Fairport, found herself pulled into that relocation, resettlement effort.
“In 2014, a friend of a friend was on Facebook,” she recalled, “resettling his Afghan interpreter here. He just needed help getting furniture and kitchen stuff in Syracuse. I reached out to him. I said that I could help. He had two interpreters, one came in April of 2014 and one came in August. Then I went on vacation and got a call that there was an interpreter family in Rochester that was not in a good situation and could I help them?
“At that point I said, ‘No. It’s not my job. Where is the government?’ But then when I got back from vacation and visited them, I realized they did need help. Hurricane Katrina was in my mind and what the ‘Cajun Navy’ did, where there were ordinary people reaching out to help. The government can’t be everywhere.
“So I decided to get friends together — it just started with me asking friends to help.”
“It” was a group called No One Left Behind, co-founded by former Afghan interpreter Janis Shinwari.
Smith, an award-winning working journalist, owned “Mine Safety and Health News,” a bi-weekly print magazine that covered news and issues concerning the health and safety of miners. She became an expert in mining operations and regulations and was a source for other journalists and government staffs.
And 23 years into running that enterprise, she found her attention teased elsewhere — to the fate of people pretty much abandoned by the government, but not the Americans who worked with them and who depended on them for their safety.
Matt Zeller, from Rochester, was trying to get Shinwari, his interpreter, to safety in the U.S. with help from the late Congresswoman Louise Slaughter.
“I signed a petition and gave Matt $100 when Janis Shinwari was coming over,” Smith said. “It was on Matt’s Facebook page that I found Michael Chapel, who needed help up here in Rochester; Michael was from the D.C. area.”
No One Left Behind started in 2014, with Smith helping to form the Rochester chapter of it.
“There were great dreams,” she said. “We were the first chapter outside the D.C. area and we were going to be a model for other chapters doing this incredibly hard work.”
But No One Left Behind decided to shut down the chapters in 2019 to focus on policy changes. The Rochester group was suddenly isolated.
Smith had become the chapter president for an active group that had just been abandoned, a familiar feeling.
“I had an advisory board up here and we decided — it took all of 10 minutes — that we were going to have our own organization and keep this dream going, of resettling people with SIVs (special immigrant visas) in Rochester,” Smith said.
As the group’s new director, she had a lot to do; build a separate organization, bring in new SIVs from Iraq and Afghanistan and take care of the families No One Left Behind had successfully brought to Upstate New York.
She was more than ready for it, by a special childhood in Cranbury, New Jersey, that prepared her for anything.
Must have been the horses
“I grew up in a very small town, not a lot of kids in our school and it was really an idyllic place to grow up. It was a very, very special town and childhood,” Smith said, settling back in the chair of her office, surrounded by piles of paper on the desk and journalism awards on the walls. This is the center of her universe and the nucleus of Keeping Our Promise.
“We were riding horses everywhere including on the baseball field. The fun thing, there is a photograph I posted on Facebook a couple of times, me and my eighth grade girlfriend on horses and another one has a pony and her pony cart — all looking tough. The beauty of it was that we were all raised as really independent young women. The freedom we had growing up at that time gave us the freedom how to work things out in life. I really believe that.
“I truly believe that my childhood of freedom is what contributed to the person I am today. We learned bravery, independence and how unfair life could be if you let it. For instance, while we could ride horses and ponies everywhere, we were not allowed to be paperboys and deliver the local newspapers.”
Smith grew up getting ready to deliver.
At Rutgers University, she met teacher Jim Moffatt, a copy editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“He steered me to the Institute of Political Journalism at Georgetown University,” she said. Right after that, she worked for Congressman Jim Florio, then left him to write about clean coal technology when he ran for New Jersey governor.
She never finished her degree work, a characteristic she found she shared with a lot of other noted journalists.
“I could write, I could read, but I realized that I probably had dyscalculia a form of dyslexia with math. Like for Thanksgiving, I can remember the names of the guests, but don’t ask me to count things. To finish my degree, I was never going to be able get through the math. I’m not the only one. The beautiful thing about being in journalism is finding out all these other journalists who didn’t get through school either, like (Brighton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning) David Cay Johnston, there are a bunch of us who never finished our studies, we went into life.”
When she started the No One Left Behind chapter, she was still being a reporter. There was no income, she said.
She told her group in 2017 “that I needed to make a choice. Either being paid for this work, or I needed to go back on the road and being a reporter, going to mining conferences again and traveling and really focusing on that. I was willing to help transition to someone who would take over what I was doing.”
The work of rebuilding a life
“I just had to make a decision. They offered to pay me, not a lot, to start out. Working with the families really touched my heart. To see families fighting for women’s rights for their daughters to be educated…everything collapsing in Afghanistan… it really hit me.”
Smith and No One Left Behind had a process in place and it’s complicated. The special immigrant visa is a U.S. State Department program with a quota for bringing people out of a conflict area. Here in Rochester people are working to help remotely as applicants go through the process.
With the visa in hand, now the family — and hopefully everyone is covered — gets ready for the trip. This is the first portion of the process and is fraught with danger.
Smith said many, many people who worked for the U.S. were left behind.
“The government did not listen to us and others who are now part of this group, the Afghani Vet Coalition. The Trump administration didn’t listen to us. The Biden administration didn’t listen to us. We were the ones working directly with families with boots on the ground in Afghanistan and everyone saw the collapse of the government if we pulled out. At the rate that they’re pulling people out now, it’s going to be 30 years before they bring everyone out,” she said.
“Will families survive? We had a family several weeks ago where the son was brought to Rochester in 2017 and his wife’s father worked for the Afghan National Police and was targeted by the Taliban. His father-in-law was arresting members of the Taliban and turning them over to the U.S. The family applied for humanitarian parole before the evacuation and were denied – the parole appeal was denied and her father was just killed by the Taliban,” she added. “There are stories of family members being killed all the time by the Taliban. It is, in my opinion, the most inhumane thing that this country has done to the Afghans — the fact that they have to leave their elderly mothers behind — or not leave. We had a family who would not come because they did not want to leave their daughter. If a child turns 21 and the case isn’t fully decided yet as to whether or not they’re going to get their visa, their child can’t come. So, we have another case where a family decided that they helped their daughter get married to someone they knew, because they could not bring her. They’re making these horrible house and choice decisions on their families and it’s absolutely the most inhumane I could think of doing to a wartime ally, and someone who supported us in this conflict for 20 years.”
Afghans who have their SIV and are waiting for the trip to America in Turkey or Pakistan face arrest in the unstable conditions in those countries. Smith said those families are the priority now. A family waiting in Sweden or Germany “is safe, they’re not going to get arrested.”
Now the airfare expense becomes a hurdle.
“It depends on how much money I can raise,” Smith said “It’s one-to-one. When we bring one family here, another one steps into line. We said we had enough money for 30 families this year, but we’re now up to 41 families. It means we can go broke sooner rather than later, but how do you say no when you know people are risking their lives?”
Miles4Migrants
Here’s where a unique partnership helps. Smith elaborated: “There’s a family in Turkey where I was able to get them tickets through Miles4Migrants, one of our partners and things are not going well in Turkey. You’ve got to get them out of Turkey. Things are also not going well in Pakistan.”
Miles4Migrants, founded in 2016, pulls together donated frequent-flyer miles to purchase one-way tickets for visa-holders to come to America. Seth Stanton, Andy Freeman and Nick Ruiz founded the organization. They started with helping just one family. They provide a lifeline for Keeping Our Promise, which can then use airfare dollars elsewhere.
“Once a family gets here, we have to support them until they’re accepted by Catholic Charities and the US Conference of Bishops and that takes some time. When they’re accepted they get $1,025 in refugee funds per person. That’s money that’s supposed to be spread out over 90 days toward their resettlement expenses: housing, food and transportation,” she said.
Afghans qualify for DSS funds; $440 a month for a single person, $875 for a family of four.
“The DSS amounts were effective in October 2012. They haven’t gone up since,” Smith said, adding that, for a family to live on that much “is impossible. You’re not going to find a two-bedroom apartment for $875; our cheapest two-bedrooms where I’m comfortable placing a family is $1,040. We want an apartment in a safe neighborhood.”
So Keeping Our Promise makes up the difference.
A family’s SNAP (food stamp) benefits are a necessary basic, but Smith noted the system can be error-prone.
“SNAP provides $939 a month for food for a family of four,” she said. “But with that they can’t buy toilet paper, they can’t buy shampoo, they can’t buy laundry detergent or cleaning supplies. We give them, initially, cleaning supplies and hygiene products. Then we’ll give them Price Rite gift cards so they’ll be able to buy those things.”
But the biggest single item and, it turns out the real key to success in America, is a car. Once a family is settled and has a bread-winner working, KOP offers a $3,000 car allowance. Not enough to buy much of a car, more of a down payment, but it’s a key.
“We’ve had the New York state drivers’ manual translated into Dari and Pashto, even though many Afghans can read English, it’s better to read it in your own language,” she said. “I get them that material when they’re still in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Turkey, wherever they are, so as soon as they get their Social Security number here, which is normally 2-4 weeks, they can take the permit test. Then we have a grant from the Unitarian Church and through the Wilmot Foundation for driving lessons.”
“I want to get them driving,” she said, pointing her index finger on her desk to underscore the importance. ”All of them say driving and getting the car is what changed their lives because that opens up the door. There are jobs in Kodak Park, but they start at 6 a.m., before bus runs. We had a guy who had to take Uber to get to the job before 6 because the buses weren’t running yet. He could take the bus home in the afternoon. For that kind of money, $125 a week, you should own a car. So now he has a car, works an extra job with Uber and can take his family to the park or to Lake Ontario or whatever. It just builds a foundation. That car is magic. It really is. That’s the game-changer. We are not in Washington DC; we are not in New York City. We are not in a place with great public transportation. These families need cars.”
How to help
Keeping Our Promise has a $470,000 yearly budget, supported by donations and grants. Smith is always looking for funds and she has to do some educating when she does.
“The problem we run into, when I tell people what we fund — like the difference between DSS and their rent — I’ll hear two things: (A) ‘Why don’t you do that for all refuges?’ My answer is ‘Because our mission is to help those who helped the US. Anyone who wants to support refugees can do this, but this is our mission. The other question: (B) ‘Why don’t you do this for poor people in the community?’ Let’s face it; Rochester has the highest extreme poverty rate in the US. When I started this, I didn’t know about Rochester’s poverty rate. I can’t solve all those problems; I can solve this problem [of bringing SIVs here],” she said. “We’re not open to all refugees, we’re not open to people seeking asylum and you have to come here on a legal visa and have to have served U.S. interests.”
“I’m also told, ‘Well, you don’t serve enough people.’ We’re not big enough. But people don’t understand what it takes to get people here. Just the amount of work it takes to get a family here is tremendous,” she added. “And we’re not here just for Afghans. Suppose an SIV program starts for Ukrainians? There’s 700 Ukrainians who work at the US Embassy in Kiev. Are they eventually going to come here under an SIV program? The embassy asked for that program and has to be agreed by Congress. Who knows what’s going on? If at same point there’s an SIV program that opens for Ukrainians, we will help them.”
Funds will certainly help KOP fulfill its mission, but Smith stressed how important “caring circles” are.
“We want every family or SIV individual to have one or two volunteers that will just help guide them in the everyday things of life:
• setting up a bank account,
• getting to a grocery store on rainy days,
• learning how to use the bus route on Google Maps on your phone
• finding the local library
• getting a library card
• going to the public market, because the public market almost doubles your SNAP benefit. It’s 40%. Every dollar you spend at the public market you get $1.40 in goods. That’s how our families survive, quite honestly.
“Caring circles are really important.”
“People from Newark, Palmyra and Canandaigua have come to me and asked how they can settle families there,” she said. “Transportation is the hardest thing. SIVs need a car.
“Someone was in my office talking about getting a grant for mental health services for families. What this SIV did was pull out a picture of his car and his family at Mendon Park. ‘This is my mental health help,’ he told us. ‘I can take my family out of the city to the park, I can go food shopping. He’s working on rehabbing buildings. He can also drive Lyft or Grub Hub or Uber. He took care of so many problems. He can earn money, he can send a little money back home to support his family stuck in Afghanistan, who are never going to get here, never going to get here. He has got to help them survive the Taliban. We just conquered 90% of his mental health problems with that vehicle.”
For more information about Keeping our Promise, visit www.keepingourpromise.org.