COME ONE, COME ALL:

In a normal refugee resettlement process, the State Department determines where people go, Kinney said. The department tries to locate them in communities with people from their country and culture, he said, and then, local resettlement agencies are told to expect a certain number of people from a particular country.

With the Afghan crisis, the process was different. For one, Kinney said, things moved much faster than they typically do. Then, there were negotiations between national and local agencies about how many refugees a given local agency could take on. For Ascentria, New Hampshire's lack of housing was one constraint. Being short-staffed was another.

Kinney said the pace of the Afghan resettlement has been unprecedented.

"We will have resettled more refugees in the last 120 days than we did in the last three years combined," he said. And it wasn't easy because much of the infrastructure agencies like Ascentria depend on had been dismantled during the Trump administration, when the country accepted only around 15,000 refugees per year, down from the 90,000 to 100,000 typically accepted. That left Ascentria scrambling to hire and train new staff to meet the needs of new arrivals.

For Wazir, it took 11 years in a refugee camp in Uzbekistan before she and her family were able to come to the United States. The time in the refugee camp was hard. They lived with the constant fear that a police officer might come to their apartment at night and take them to jail. There were times when they were instructed not to open the door if someone knocked. Wazir was enrolled in school there but was misunderstood by other school children, who called her a Taliban kid and ran from her in fear on her first day in the school. She was 7 years old at the time.

"It's hard to grasp those moments," she said. "It sticks with me. We might forget the good stories of our lives, but the bad ones stick with you."

It was her father's idea to come to New Hampshire. He wanted to be in the countryside, a calm and peaceful place where his daughter could go to school without fear that something would stop her from pursuing her dream. He wanted a place that was convenient, accessible, and on the smaller side. "The biggest dream was for me to go to school and be able to stand up for myself," Wazir said. It's a dream she has been able to realize in New Hampshire.

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