Nampans work to reunite family
Mohammed Khan, right, welcomes his sister Khadija Khan Friday afternoon at the Boise Airport where Khadija arrived after a five-year struggle with immigration from the Middle East.
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bdooley@idahopress.com
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
NAMPA — Seventeen-year-old Khadija Khan arrived Friday at the Boise Airport looking exhausted after her long journey from Peshawar, Pakistan, where two brothers still await visas.
It was the first time Mohammed Khan, her older brother, and Humaira Khan, her mother, had seen the Afghan teen's face in nearly a decade. Her arrival comes after a 5-year struggle by Mohammed and others to bring his three siblings to the country he loves.
Mohammed said he feels it is his duty to ensure his younger siblings, who were left to fend for themselves when their father died in late 2003, are safe and given the opportunity to succeed. Recent developments in Pakistan, where fear of suicide bombings is a day-to-day reality, have only increased the sense of urgency, he said.
He has received help from former U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, U.S. Sen. Jim Risch and others, he said, but the process has been daunting.
"The last time I saw her she was seven or eight," Mohammed said of Khadija. "It shouldn't take five years for someone to bring their family over here to be reunited."
Now, Mohammed — who was laid off after eight years at Micron Technology and is now studying for an associate degree — hopes to see Khadija get an education and begin the process of naturalization.
He and his wife Tiffany plan to help her enroll in a GED program at the College of Western Idaho, if that's what she wants, "so she can provide for herself and serve the community," he said.
"So she can be a person. So she can have some rights."
Man's Nampa roots
Mohammed's ties to the community date back more than 20 years.
Then a small child, Mohammed suffered a jaw injury during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in a blast that destroyed his family's home and left one of his sisters dead.
His father, a member of the Afghan air force, was targeted, and the family fled to Pakistan as refugees, Mohammed said.
Doctors had stitched the cuts and attempted to treat his wound with traditional medicine, he said, but the underlying injury eventually left him completely unable to open his mouth.
In 1986, under a government aid program, Mohammed was brought to Idaho for treatment by a Boise surgeon. Doctors assigned him an estimated birth date that would now make him 31, although he is unsure of his exact age.
His first stay lasted two years. A return trip in 1992 for additional treatment lasted three years, during which he attended school, met his future wife Tiffany as a seventh-grader at Nampa's West Junior High School and converted to Christianity. He stayed with host parents Clarence and Alice McIntyre, who he still refers to as mom and dad.
The experience changed him forever, he said.
"When I came here, I felt a connection to this land, to this people. Everything seemed perfectly right," he said. "This is heaven on earth. People don't realize it, but this is so close to heaven on earth."
Family sees divide
When Mohammed returned to his family in Pakistan after his medical visa expired in 1995, he found his relatives struggling to get by and his parents' relationship crumbling, he said.
"My father had become a completely different person. We didn't see eye to eye," he said. "He had accepted Islam in a very extreme way."
When his parents eventually divorced, Mohammed said he began teaching English in an attempt to provide for his mother, sister and three brothers as well as he could.
After his father forcibly took custody of Khadija and Mohammed's two youngest brothers, Mohammed began to discuss a return to the U.S with his former host family, the McIntyres, he said.
His first requests for permission to enter the country were rejected, but in 2000 Mohammed returned to Nampa with his mother and one of his brothers, David, who is now working overseas as a translator for the U.S. State Department.
Mohammed and Tiffany were married in October of that year and now have an 8-year-old son, Braeden.
Mohammed received a letter from one of his brothers in late 2003 notifying him their father had died, he said.
While Mohammed had worked through the immigration process from outside the country, working on behalf of his siblings was a completely different experience, he said.
"It's been a struggle. We've been sending them money. They've been driving taxis. They've grown up, but they have no education ..." he said of his siblings.
Tiffany said the process formally began in July 2004. The three siblings received approval to migrate to the U.S. in January 2007 and interviewed for visas at the embassy in Peshawar in October, and Khadija's visa was finally approved last week.
"It's been five years of a lot of stress," she said, "a lot of waiting and paperwork."
