HOWDY, NEIGHBORS:

LOWELL -- Scarcely any of the 40 Afghans who trooped off planes at the Manchester, N.H., airport on an unseasonably warm day on Nov. 18, 2021, had ever heard of Lowell.

Among the dazed and weary refugees at the airport was an irrepressibly optimistic former US military interpreter called Noori. His wife, Samya, and two young daughters, Taqwa and Zahra, were at his side. They were exhausted, but they were safe.

Noori recalled that he didn't know a single person in New England. He didn't have a job. Or a car. Or an apartment. Or a winter coat. But he had his family.

And here he was, finally in America. Outside the doors of the airport lay the land of prosperity and opportunity, and the big, fast cars from the American movies of his youth.

For about a decade Noori, 33, had worked, first alongside US Marines in the hills of Helmand Province and then in classrooms teaching English, to make his country more like that shimmering vision of America. But in Afghanistan at least, that vision melted away as soon as the United States withdrew its forces a year ago.

After a harrowing escape and a grueling journey halfway around the world, Noori and his fellow Afghans quickly found that life in Lowell is no Hollywood movie.

"We thought that in America all the facilities of life were going to be provided for you," he said. "It's true that it has, if you work [for it]."

Noori and several hundred other Afghan refugees who have been resettled in Lowell have set about doing what they could not in their own country.

They're building lives in peace while forging a united community that is, slowly, bridging the divides of language and creed that have riven Afghanistan for decades.

"The United States of America did not build a nation in Afghanistan, and now the Afghans who are here are trying to build a new nation here in the United States," said Jeff Thielman, president of the International Institute of New England, which resettled many of the Afghans.

And in the past year, Noori has gone from being just another Afghan in the crowd to a community leader, always eager to help his compatriots even as he navigates his own obstacles in the new country he's proud to now call home.

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