Please help this Afghan family get to safety

Claire Berlinski is organizing this fundraiser.

Donation protected

The Cosmopolitan Globalist magazine, the physicist Lawrence Krauss, and a wonderful team of five sponsors in Toronto are

working together to save this Afghan family of eight, of whom five are girls and young women, from the Taliban. We want to bring them to Canada, where they can live in peace and the girls can go back to school. We've found a realistic and practical way to do this: The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) is given a limited number of spaces for refugee sponsorship each year by the Canadian government. A sponsorship group is a committed group of at least five people who live in the community where the new arrivals will live. We've found a wonderful sponsorship group in Toronto, and they're eager to welcome the family. We've filed the application, about which we've very optimistic--after all, if this family doesn't qualify, no one would.

Now, we need to raise the money to support the family for 12 months or until they become self supporting (whichever comes first). We need to put these funds in a trust account before October 1. We're trying to raise the funds in many different ways: We're hoping the people who've contributed to this GoFundMe will make up a significant part of it. It's your contributions that have kept this family safe since the Taliban came to power, and they're inexpressibly grateful for them.

This family has suffered unimaginably. After Kabul fell, they lived in hiding and in terror until they escaped to Pakistan. The girls' mother used to be a lawyer and women's rights activist: She had received legal training from the US Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Before the Taliban seized power, she put men who abused, battered and killed women behind bars. The Taliban freed them, and they have already murdered her colleagues. The family has been even more at risk because their father worked for a Western health NGO and because they 're Tajiks, an ethnic minority the Taliban persecutes ruthlessly. Their pleas to be evacuated by the French or the US governments--for whom they had worked--fell on deaf ears.

Thanks to your help and your generosity, they've been able to escape to Islamabad and wait there, in relative security, while SHARP (the UN's subcontractor in Pakistan) processes their applications for refugee status. This is a process that can take years, but if they're accepted by the MCC's program, they can bypass the bureaucracy.

They need your help again. To be eligible for Canada's community sponsorship program, they need to show that they have a community to welcome and support them (and they do!) and funds sufficient to support them during their first year.

Please help: No one but this community has helped them. The world has washed its hands of Afghanistan's women and girls. Every penny you contribute goes directly to the family and is put to the best use possible. You're genuinely saving the lives of a loving family and these bright, hardworking girls whose only crime was being born in Afghanistan. They are grateful beyond measure for your support and so am I.

As you might have read, Pakistan is deporting refugees back to Afghanistan by the hundreds of thousands. This has us very concerned. They're in Pakistan legally, but in many cases, this doesn't matter--and when their visas expire, they'll be extremely vulnerable to this. Time is running out. We won't really relax until they're truly somewhere safe.

On a personal note, the generosity you've shown to this family has been deeply moving to me. Whenever I'm tempted to despair about the state of the world, I think of this. This campaign has brought out the very best of the human spirit in so many people.

We're as grateful for small donations as we are for big ones: They really add up. And if you have any thoughts or suggestions about fundraising beyond GoFundMe, would you please get in touch?

(We still feel it would be best not to post their photographs on the Internet, given the situation in Pakistan, but if you'd like to see lovely photographs of the family in Islamabad, send me an email.)

Learn more about their story here:

A letter to the world from an Afghan family