In a hotel room in Albania, Afghan women await new lives — and watch their homeland collapse

Throughout the day I check in on the fellow Afghan women sharing a roof with me at our hotel in the Albanian resort town of Shengjin. They joke that I am Albania’s new therapist. We play card games and visit Albanian pastry shops where the deserts taste bittersweet, like our exile.We try to fill our days with activities to make the time pass more quickly. Last month, I attended a trauma care course, facilitated by the international relief organization Samaritan’s Purse, where we talked — or at least tried to talk — about all we left behind. In the courtyard of the hotel there is a strange replica of the Statue of Liberty. My two sons always try to climb it. I try not to take its look of cheap plasticity as some type of omen that liberty in our next home –if there is a next — is just a puffed-up façade like the version we were sold in Afghanistan.There, the situation is bleak. The My husband and I quickly packed a few suitcases, mostly clothes for our two children and my stepdaughter, and caught the last commercial flight to Kabul. In the rush to leave, I left behind some meaningful items, including my university diploma. I was educated entirely in Afghanistan, and am the first woman in my family to complete secondary education, let alone receive a university degree. After escaping Herat, my family and I spent a month fearfully alternating between a European nonprofit organization office in Kabul and a friend’s apartment. The Taliban know who I am. For the past decade, I have been advocating for domestic abuse survivors andWhile I have childhood memories of the Taliban beating women in the streets for not wearing their burqas properly, my later teen years were filled with promise. There was countless international funding for programs targeted at women’s equality and conferences filled with ‘important people’ from foreign countries who told us we could be anything we wanted to be.Women’s rights were supposed to be the success story of the 2001 US invasion, but the legacy of war has been killing our women for years. An estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not go to school, 87% of Afghan women are illiterate, and more than 70% face forced marriage. Still, over the last two decades, the US spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting women’s rights in Afghanistan, and a whole generation of us entered our careers with genuine hope for gender equality. Now, it all feels like empty slogans. What will become of all the impressive women I know who are lawyers, doctors, teachers, politicians? The Taliban claims it won’t hurt them, but the reality is likely to be far different, and already the women of Afghanistan are being forced inside again.Just last week, photos circulated on social media of workers at clothing shops in Herat cutting off the heads of female mannequins. Taliban authorities have labeled them “un-Islamic.” Earlier this month, they banned women without male chaperones from entering cafes in the city. CNN has not been able to independently verify these reports, though they tally with what I’ve heard from Afghans living there. Last month, the Taliban also banned women from traveling farther than 45 miles without a close male relative. Four years ago, on International Women’s Day, I gave birth to my second son. I made a promise to myself that I would never raise my children in a country where women are second-class citizens.Unfortunately, our country’s future has been decided. And it doesn’t include us. So, I will wait for another plane to take us even farther away from a country I love but that doesn’t love me. I will wait to build us a new life. Afghan women are strong, but we shouldn’t need to be this strong.