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Saturday, May 31, 2003

People at the Giant Eagle turned their eyes from the disfigured woman in the embroidered saffron dress. Then someone noticed she was putting all her vegetables into one plastic bag. "Tell her she has to use another bag," someone said. One week in the United States and Aqila Khan has yet to deduce that each vegetable gets its own plastic bag. This is America, lady.

	Aqila Khan lost her right hand and suffered extensive scarring from a Taliban rocket that struck her home in Afghanistan, killing her husband and her daughter. Now she is seeking to start a new life in America with her three surviving sons. (Lake Fong, Post-Gazette)

There is much to learn. Grocery shopping. Cards that count as money. Skim milk. How to get a job when you have only one hand and a face smeared half off by a Taliban rocket.

The day five years ago that self-appointed messengers of God bombarded Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, Aqila was home with her husband, Ayoob, a farmer, and their 6-year-old daughter, Fatima. Yahya, her oldest son, and the two younger ones, Yaqoob and Faiza, played outside.

The house blew up when the rocket hit. By the time Aqila awoke in a medical center, doctors had sewn shut the stump where her right hand had been and neighbors had buried her husband and daughter.

Two weeks later, with no medical treatment for the burns that seared her face and left her left eye permanently open, she fled to Pakistan with her children, sister and parents. Sponsored by Catholic Charities, she reached Pittsburgh last week, owing more than $4,000 in plane fare to the U.S. government. She has no idea what comes next.

Muqamudin Niamat, an Afghan refugee who speaks five languages, stopped by to interpret for her.

"I want my children to maybe study. If it is possible, I can work," Aqila said.

To maybe study. Yahya, who just turned 14, has perhaps one year of schooling. Schools in Mazar-e Sharif were not easy to keep open with the Taliban bombing the place. In Islamabad, where they fled, a student must pay for school. Yahya stays home, cares for the two younger children, cleans, cooks, tends to his mother and some nights stretches out on his bed in what should be a living room, and picks his way through simple English books.

"They said after this summer I can go to school," he said.

A Farsi-English dictionary is in a nearby cabinet and a handwritten list shows some of the first words he translated into our tongue: "terrified, certain, trembling, growled."

Khadra Mohammed, a Somali woman born in Yemen and now living in Pittsburgh, has looked after dozens of refugee families as they find their way to Prospect Park, a sprawling housing estate in Whitehall.

She came calling with Lezley Pisone, a convert to Islam who is co-founding a refugee center with Mohammed. The pair wants to end Aqila's isolation by finding a plastic surgeon. And they want to get Yahya focused on learning the things children learn when they're not forced to be the family's adult male.

"We need to get him retired and into school," Mohammed said.

But first, the family needed food. Mohammed piled them into her minivan and drove to the Giant Eagle in Caste Village, where children from a country without electricity marveled at doors that open themselves and food with its picture on the outside of the box.

"To refugees, all soda is Pepsi," Mohammed explained when the word found its way out of Yahya's mouth. Aqila pointed to a 25-pound sack of flour. They gathered up radishes, a huge bag of onions, ground beef, a scary looking package of liver. Aqila looked around and found a fancy looking dessert cake in the bakery section.

I worried about how it would look: This immigrant woman on food stamps buying an elaborate pastry. It seemed like every troubling cliche thrown at the underprivileged.

Mohammed defended the choice. The children, she said, deserved a treat.

	Aqila Kahn, left, with her children, Faiza, 5, Yahya, 14, and Yaqoob, 6. (Lake Fong, Post-Gazette)

The bill came to $76.06. Mohammed explained to Aqila how much she has left on her food stamp card and how she can carry over the balance for two months, after which any remaining credits are wiped clean. It was hard to tell whether she was getting through. Aqila can't even figure out American style numbers. How does someone explain food stamp credits -- equivalent to but not exactly money -- stored on a magnetic card when the listener speaks no English and comes from a country with no credit cards?

Back at the one-bedroom flat, Yahya picked up groceries. Aqila used her remaining hand to load them into cabinets.

"I wish," she said at one point, "I had some pictures of my husband and daughter." When the Taliban's rocket hit, the family history vanished with it. The kids can't remember his face.

A few minutes passed when Yahya emerged from the kitchen with watery glasses of orange juice and slices of the dessert cake. He handed, or tried to hand them, to his visitors.

"Aren't you going to have some?" Mohammed asked Yahya.

He spoke to his mother in Farsi.

"She says it is for the guests."

The cake was bought by a widow with one hand and no money for the American who watched with suspicious disapproval. I called 6-year-old Yaqoob to my chair, spooned cake into his happy mouth, and thought that Aqila must have once been very pretty before she became so beautiful.