Hi, my name is Elizabeth Sherwood and I am fundraising for Zabihullah Quraishi and his wife, Nilofar Quraishi. Nilofar and Zabihullah are Afghan evacuees currently living in Mexico City and striving to go to Canada where Nilofar has family and the couple also has friends and employment opportunities. I became familiar with their story from an article that I read in the Washington Post (Unsettled: Searching for home after escaping the Taliban) and decided to reach out to them. As an American, and an English speaking person living in Mexico City part time, and as a mother and grandmother, their story is one that touched me. Nilofar and Zabihullah attempted to leave Kabul on August 26th and were at the airport, however Nilofar, then five months pregnant, was not feeling well so they decided to return home, leaving through the same gate that later was a place of devastation. As you may remember that was the date that a bomb caused destruction at the Kabul airport killing 183 people .

Nilofar, worked as a journalist in Afghanistan for the Maiwand Radio Television Network, which operated under the Ministry of Information and Culture. The news reports included live updates on the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, in order to inform people about the human rights atrocities they were perpetrating. Additionally, her network interviewed previous government officials, showed the violence of Taliban rule, and reported on violence against women, including the murder of a female reporter in Nangarhar. When the Taliban took over Kabul she stopped working as the human resources office told her not to come back. As the Taliban now has access to records of the Ministry of Information and Culture, they have access to the names of everyone who worked at Maiwand. Nilofar speaks several languages including Persian and Pashto.

Zabihullah is a civil engineer who did his undergraduate studies in Pakistan and also completed his master's degree and was working on his doctorate in addition to working as a consultant at Mott Macdonald Consultancy, a British company, where he worked on the Iran-Afghan Transit Road Mega Project in Herat, Afghanistan. Zabihullan is fluent in several languages including English, Persian, Arabic, Pashto and Urdu.

Friends let them know if they could get to Mexico they could help them. Nilofar and Zabihullah crossed to Iran and received a tourist visa to Mexio. However, to add to their stress when their flight from Istanbul landed in Mexico they were returned to Istanbul until the Mexican Foreign Ministry changed their minds and they returned to Mexico again. They arrived finally after having to sell all their valuable possessions including all of Nilofar's jewelry. Niloafar and Zabihullah became the proud parents of a beautiful baby girl, Oswah, delivered by cesarean section in December.

I fortunately have found Nilofar and Zabihullah, in the face of all these difficulties, to be a warm, gracious and loving couple, of course missing and fearful for their family members, but ready to work hard and make the life of their daughter ideally a loving and safe one. Given the challenges in Afghanistan, they want to contribute to the new country they will call "home"

I am hoping to help with some of their costs for Canadian visas and travel as well as getting settled in Canada.Please do consider contributing what you might and if sharing this story is something that you would like to do, please consider doing so. Thank you for your compassion and generosity.