Outside the entrance to his flood-damaged house, 18-year-old engineering student Rehanullah Khan rests against the trunk of a winding tree. He is dressed in a traditional cotton kurta shalwar, tunic and trousers, which might once have been gray or blue but are now completely brown, caked with layers of mud.

For the past two days, he and his family have been working round the clock to shovel all the mud and water out of their house, struck by the recent floods. After taking a moment to catch his breath, he picks up his shovel and gets back to work, clearing a path from the road to his door.

“No one has come to help us, not from the government or anywhere else,” he says. “Officials from the administration say that if they come down here, they might slip in the mud and break their bones.”

In some of the spots that Mr. Khan has not yet cleared, the mud lies 3 feet deep. His cousin, Salman, who lives in the same house, says that the family has lost most of their belongings in the flood. “We had to get out of here in a hurry and we were only able to take a couple of things,” he says. “Everything else got taken by the water. I swear it’s been four or five days since any of us have slept. We spend all day and night trying to clean up the mess.”

The cousins live in a poverty-stricken neighborhood called Sultanabad in the city of Nowshera on the banks of the River Kabul, which surged in the early hours of Aug. 27. As in other parts of the country, the record flooding has tested the resilience of local families as well as the district administration, which has been scrambling to contain the crisis and evacuate victims to higher ground. 

Hasan Ali

Engineering student Rehanullah Khan shovels the mud outside his flood-affected house in Nowshera, Pakistan, on Sept. 2, 2022. “No one has come to help us, not from the government or anywhere else," he says.

“We had a single objective in our minds,” says Deputy Commissioner Reza Ozgen, the top civil servant in the district. “When I assembled my team on the day of the flood, I told them that we can’t control the damages that will take place, but what we can do is ensure that no life is lost and that’s what we were successful in.”

That is a significant achievement; more than 1,200 people – almost one-third of them children – have died since the monsoon began at the end of June. Sherry Rehman, the government’s climate change minister, calls the flooding a crisis of “unimaginable” proportions imposed by “other countries that have gotten rich on the back of unchecked fossil fuel consumption.”

Pakistan is especially vulnerable, she says, “because we are on the front lines … [with] the largest number of glaciers in the world, as well as the hottest cities on the planet.”

Lessons from 2010

The last catastrophic floods in Pakistan occurred in 2010, when over 20 million people lost livestock, farmland, or houses. Early indications suggest that this monsoon is likely to be even more devastating: The National Disaster Management Authority calculates that over 33 million people are likely to be affected.

In Nowshera, officials estimate that more than 8,000 houses have been partially or fully damaged – a number that is expected to rise significantly as more reports come in from the field. Gul Mohammad, who used to make a living pushing an ice-cream cart, is one of many whose homes have been left uninhabitable. He is now sleeping rough on a straw bed in the road. “Everything is finished. I’ve lost everything,” he says. “Praise be to Allah I’m still alive – but that’s it.”

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Karen Norris/Staff

Local officials maintain, however, that the damage could have been far greater had successive governments not learned lessons from the floods of 2010. Assistant Commissioner Ummar Awais Kiani points to the flood protection wall built by the government along the River Kabul as evidence that progress had been made in disaster preparedness.

“If this protection wall hadn’t been built, we would have had complete devastation. The entire district would have been flooded,” he says.

At the same time, the local government has also come under criticism. Senior civil servant Mr. Ozgen argues that riverbed encroachment, by illegally constructed buildings, has narrowed the flow of water in areas like Nowshera and increased the risk of flooding.

“Over time our institutions have become weak,” he says. “There are a lot of loopholes where building plans are approved, and we know why they’re approved – through somebody’s influence or under the table … you know … and eventually the country has to pay the price for that.”

Hasan Ali

Salman Khan, a resident of Nowshera, surveys the damage inside his house on Sept. 2, 2022. He and his relatives have been working for days to shovel mud and water out of their home.

Humanitarian response

It has also been a challenge to coordinate the humanitarian response, not least because Pakistan is in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis that has left vast swaths of the population struggling to sustain themselves. “It’s not that the aid hasn’t come,” says Mr. Mohammad. “It’s just that there are so many people who have turned up from far and wide, setting up tents and pretending to be flood victims. They’ve stolen the morsels out of our mouths.”

This has obliged the district administration to change its approach toward distributing aid. “Initially we had 71 relief camps,” says Mr. Ozgen. But “slowly we started finding out that people who were not affected were coming to those camps and taking all the goods,” he explains. “Now we’re operating only four [camps] and those are the ones where the real affectees are staying.”

The change of strategy has involved encouraging as many of the flood victims as possible to return to their own homes, whose sorry condition is evidence of their inhabitants’ need. “As long as they go back, we will be able to provide rations to their homes,” says Mr. Ozgen. “Secondly, they will help our administration and the municipal services to clear the streets and clean the houses.”

But some relief workers challenge this approach. “The local official has told me to shift people back home, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that,” complains Muhammad Ismail, who runs a relief camp in a Nowshera school. The camp’s residents are refusing to leave, he says, “and even if I was able to evict them by force, where will these people go? Their houses are knee deep in water and mud.”

But the authorities have suspended relief aid to Mr. Ismail’s camp, and he says he cannot continue to feed the 50 children under his care from his own funds. “Adults can go hungry but what are we to do about these children?” he asks. “How are they supposed to get by without any assistance?”

Qurut-ul-ain Wazir, the official tasked with coordinating the government’s relief efforts, argues that given the scale of the disaster her team will never be able to satisfy all the needs; she is appealing for help from private groups.

“Because this is an emergency, we cannot achieve 100% success,” she says. “We might be able to solve 60 or 70% of the problems, but the remaining 30% has to come from the nongovernmental sector.”

Biologist Lynn Rogers is sitting at the kitchen table in his research center when a big black bear looms in his window.

“Oh,” says Dr. Rogers casually. “There’s Jack now.”

One-Eyed Jack is a 350-pound, 24-year-old bear missing his left eye from a homeowner’s shotgun blast and with a hole in his side, probably from an old car collision. He is one of dozens of wild black bears who occasionally visit Dr. Rogers’ wildlife research center in this pine and aspen forest 13 miles southwest of Ely, Minnesota.

Jack is more regular than most. While other bears often opt for natural berries and ant nests in the forest, Jack is old and a bit stiff, and will go for the trough of cashew nuts and sunflower seeds always available here. He munches blithely as Dr. Rogers sticks his hand into the bear’s scraggly fur and feels the animal’s heartbeat – 106 beats per minute, all fine. The researcher offers several handfuls of hazelnuts, a beary treat, which Jack gently licks from his cupped hands.

Dr. Rogers has spent his life with bears. For decades he walked through the woods alongside wild black bears, hanging out as they ate, and even sleeping next to them. He earned their trust, and has devoted his career to trying to convince the public to see them as gentle creatures – to replace fear with empathy and to challenge persistent misconceptions. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Black bears come in many colors – black, brown, cinnamon, blond, blue-gray, or white – more colors than any other North American mammal.

“My life is trying to spread the truth of the bears,” he says. “People grow up the same way I did: seeing the outdoor magazines – fear sells. The covers showed bears in the most ferocious way, hitting somebody and the evil look on the face, evil eyes. [People] interpret everything out of fear. If they do meet a bear, any sound it makes is a growl. If it looks at you, it’s eyeing you.”

For the record, Dr. Rogers says a bear has never growled at him, even when he poked and prodded it. Lots of huffing, teeth clacking, but no growls.

Compassion and controversy

His devotion to peaceful coexistence speaks of a responsibility fed by compassion. Both black bear and human populations have grown significantly, and as each encroaches on the other’s habitat, encounters have grown. That makes his cause controversial and has earned him the wrath of state and federal officials.

Dr. Rogers has been investigated, charged with crimes, and denied the permits for his research. Critics have smeared his name, stripped his research permits, and seized bears that he was studying.

Dr. Rogers contends his work threatened other researchers and challenged the validity of public campaigns warning about the danger of bears.

“The deeper I got into stuff, the more my findings conflicted with conventional wisdom, and the stuff that wildlife biologists had believed and been teaching the public as fact for years,” he says. “Then they see me doing something that just doesn’t fit any of that at all. And still having all my fingers and toes.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Dr. Rogers, an accomplished wildlife photographer, sits in his office at the research institute.

He beat all the charges. Along the way, he earned praise from famed chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall, to whom he is often compared, and renowned Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson. Dr. Rogers was named Minnesota’s “Environmental Hero” in 1996, collected research commendations, starred in a dozen nature documentaries, and grew a fiercely loyal following.

He built a nonprofit bear center in Ely that draws 30,000 visitors each year, and works at his own Wildlife Research Institute, offering bear-immersive field workshops attended by people from all over the world.

“We like to have the bears teach the people,” says Lorie Kennedy, who works with Dr. Rogers and helps teach the classes. Bears “win people over because they see how gentle they really are.”

Early bear encounters

The first time Dr. Rogers encountered a bear he thought it might be his last.

As a teenager on a fishing trip in Upper Michigan, he threw his blankets on the ground to sleep outside the tent. “I just wanted to hear all the sounds because I was deep into birds,” he recalls.

“And then I heard footsteps in the darkness. Big. I could tell from the footsteps.

“Big sniffing,” – he inhales mightily to demonstrate – “not some little teeny animal.

“I froze in fear when I felt it sniff my feet. And then it sniffed its way up to my face and was sniffing through the blanket. And I just laid there perfectly still.”

The biologist, a relentless storyteller, pauses for effect. “And the bear went off and tipped over a garbage can.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Elvis, a yearling, sits at a picnic table eating peanuts in the yard of the Wildlife Research Institute.

Dr. Rogers is quick to note that was a long time ago. He is 83, he reminds visitors. His red hair has turned wispy and white and, he says, it’s getting harder for him to get back up after kneeling down to commune with a bear nose to nose. Yet he persists. As to his career accomplishments, he demurs with a Midwesterner’s laconic drawl, “Well, I’m not done yet.”

But he allows some retrospection. He believes he has helped create more humane research methods, created safer spaces for black bears, and exposed thousands of people to a side of bears they don’t expect. He says he has pushed back against a one-sided view of the relationship between two species: humans and bears.

“I was just learning stuff that people thought was not possible,” he says.

Dr. Rogers’ belief in the fiction of fierce black bears was earned in the face of encounters that others might describe as frightening.

He started off as an intern at Michigan State University helping “dart” bears with tranquilizers and tag them for study. One day he saw a drugged bear cub that had fled up a tree fall to its death when it lost consciousness. The young Mr. Rogers began scampering up the trees after bears, lassoing them as they got sleepy, and gently lowering them to the ground.

“Some of the bears I was capturing were nuisance bears. And I’d hear people’s stories about this rogue bear with its eyes shining out of the darkness and how dangerous they are. But what they were afraid of is more what they were afraid the bear would do, [rather] than what it really did.”

As he was collecting cubs for study, “the mother bears would charge me sometimes,” he says. “And I’d stand up and yell, all ferocious, and they’d stop 20 feet away.” He soon learned that a charging bear was a bluffing bear.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Mama black bear Jewel and two of her three cubs – dubbed Maverick, Goose, and Iceman by locals – visit a residential backyard in Ely, Minnesota. When bears visit, Dr. Rogers’ neighbors alert him so he can bring course participants to see them.

A kinder, gentler researcher

The fearlessness and compassion of the intern were recognized by prominent researcher Albert Erickson, who offered Dr. Rogers a scholarship at the University of Minnesota that turned into advanced degrees in biology, and eventually into a job with the U.S. Forest Service. He became noted for his maverick ways.

“All of my research has been to try new things to learn new things and to find kinder, gentler ways of doing research,” Dr. Rogers says. “Eventually, I even eliminated tranquilizers.”

Soon, Dr. Rogers was standing his ground in the face of the most bellicose bears. They would huff and huff, stamp their feet, and charge to within a few feet of him. Sometimes they would swipe a bush or tree limb menacingly to show they meant business.

They never did.

“The more ferocious they look, the more you know that is just talk,” he says.

He started following them, a 6-foot bearded biologist loping along with them, calling, “Here bear, here bear. It’s me bear.” He hung out while they foraged in the forest, and eventually even bedded down to sleep next to them.

He took meticulous notes on what the bears did, what they ate, how they behaved, and he collected their feces in plastic bags for samples. His notes were the first intimate research into the social lives of wild bears, and began earning him fame.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Lynn Rogers feeds Elvis, a yearling black bear, hazelnuts on Aug. 10, 2022, in Ely, Minnesota.

Dr. Rogers contends that bears lash out defensively mostly when they are feeling threatened by humans – it is the bear that is afraid of the human. When he proved himself unthreatening, the bears tolerated his presence. “The less a bear fears a person the less defensive it becomes,” he argues.

He concedes, “People are killed. There’s about 900,000 black bears in North America, and only about one person – if that – gets killed per year. So that comes out to one out of about a million kill somebody.”

When black bears attack

A 2011 study by Stephen Herrero found 63 fatalities by black bears in North America between 1900 and 2009, though other counts show a somewhat higher rate – 31 since 2000. Most of the deadly attacks occur in deep woods by male bears, sometimes stressed for food.

But nonfatal attacks show a different pattern, according to a study published last year of the 210 confirmed nonfatal injuries by black bears in the United States between 2000 and 2017, done by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and in Alaska. These injuries often occurred when bears accustomed to humans came in inadvertent contact with people. In 40% of the cases, the study found, women walking dogs tried to interfere when their dogs harassed a female bear, and the humans were injured – some seriously, some not. “Dogs [especially off leash] can trigger defensive attacks by black bears,” the study says.

Most researchers characterize black bear attacks as “rare.” Dr. Rogers contends the incidence is so small it should not color our view of all black bears. “The answer to just about any question about bear [behavior] is that ‘some do, and some don’t,’” he says.

And he rejects the axiom that black bear mothers are ferocious in protecting their cubs. In 2010 he demonstrated his belief by climbing into a bear den to install a web camera. The video feed was shown daily in hundreds of schools and viewed in 132 countries, he says. It topped Google and Yahoo search results when mother Lily gave birth to two cubs. Dr. Rogers installed other “den cams,” regularly climbing in with mothers and cubs, ignoring the occasional bluffing lunges.

But his methods became too much for his superiors. Wildlife agencies have been held legally responsible for mitigating the risk of attacks, and have long-standing programs aimed at convincing the public to avoid bears, yet here was a guy crawling into bear dens, feeding bears by hand, and putting radio collars on them while they were awake.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Nine women taking one of Dr. Rogers’ black bear field study courses hike to a bear den outside Ely.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Dawn Springstead, from Ontario, climbs out of an empty bear den after taking a look inside. A trail cam covering a wide view of the den area allows researchers to gather intel on black bear behavior.

Conflicts with wildlife officials

In 1991 Dr. Rogers documented the importance of Minnesota’s iconic white pine to bears and other wildlife, and challenged the government to stop logging licenses for this species. This came with the growing spotlight on his advocacy of bears, and the U.S. Forest Service had had enough. He was brought up on several alleged administrative violations and criminally charged with euthanizing two orphaned bear cubs. Dr. Rogers says they would have died without their mother, and notes his research permit allowed him to do what he did. After years of bureaucratic and court battles, Dr. Rogers agreed to leave the U.S. Forest Service in 1993 after 17 years in return for a clean record and his full pension rights.

His conflicts with state authorities, though, continued. His message of tolerance for bears – and a more nuanced understanding of human and bear safety – cut into the state’s effort to boost bear hunting licenses and its warnings to be cautious around bears. On two occasions, the state succeeded in revoking his collaring permit, and he still cannot put radio collars on bears.

“The problems come when my work conflicts with their economic goals, and it also comes when it conflicts with their beliefs and what they’ve been teaching the public,” Dr. Rogers says.

Dave Olfelt, director of the Division of Fish and Wildlife for Minnesota, notes that Dr. Rogers had permits to collar bears for 14 years. But the bears that became accustomed to coming to Dr. Rogers’ feeding station prompted complaints from some neighbors.

“We think encouraging feeding increases the likelihood of negative interactions” with people, Mr. Olfelt says in a phone interview. “We still don’t think it’s a good idea to feed bears. They are big, wild animals.”

Mr. Olfelt says the state agency also felt Dr. Rogers did not publish enough research to warrant his continued research permit, a contention Dr. Rogers adamantly disputes.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A black bear cub climbs a tree when it senses danger while mama bear Katrina and her other two cubs keep eating in the yard of one of Dr. Rogers’ neighbors, who feed the bears.

Still, the standard advice on government websites, camping brochures, and signs in wilderness parks is to take precautions to avoid bears. Bears that frequent neighborhoods or campsites may be labeled nuisance bears and relocated or killed.

Dr. Rogers seeks more honest communication about bears to the public. He says too many wildlife managers think “bears with greater contact with people would be more likely to attack and kill people. No data supports that,” he contends.

In fact, Dr. Rogers has long offered food to bears he studies, and his research cabin in Minnesota draws bears that feed at his ever-full trays of nuts and seeds.

He says his fed bears are more – not less – tolerant of people.

John Hechtel, a wildlife biologist in Alaska who spent nearly 30 years with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and is prominent in international bear conservation groups, says much of Dr. Rogers’ work is respected by bear managers and biologists.

“He knows a lot about their body language and behavior. But I think he has chosen to simplify the messaging to, black bears aren’t dangerous,” Mr. Hechtel says by phone from Fairbanks.

“I agree that the relative danger of bears, black bears especially, is low. But it’s not like it doesn’t happen,” he says. “There’s a lot of people who need a lot less fear of bears, but there’s some people who need a bit more. My inbox and my social media feed is full of stuff about people being dumb around wild animals.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Bear gorp – nuts, seeds, and M&M’s – are put out for black bears in a neighbor’s yard. Bears come to feed when their natural food sources, such as berries, aren’t available.

Joel Zachry, a biologist who led wilderness groups in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Alaska for more than 40 years and served as president of two bear conservation groups, also credits Dr. Rogers for dispelling some myths about black bears.

But he notes, “Lynn Rogers has always been controversial among most bear people because bears are wild animals, and that element never leaves.” 

Dr. Rogers “no doubt has a special relationship with some of those animals, but when that wild element expresses itself someone is going to be hurt.”

Dr. Rogers says he was never intentionally injured by a bear, but he concedes he’s been bruised and scratched. He downplays one incident in which he acknowledges he was “full of fear.” A female bear charged and did not stop, and Dr. Rogers tripped. With the bear standing over him, Dr. Rogers says he kicked at the bear’s throat and punched her in the head. Then, as “she was deciding what to do, I laid still so I was not a threat.” The standoff simply ended, and the bear lumbered back to her cubs.

A community of tolerance

Dr. Rogers found a community accepting of his methods in Eagles Nest, a sparsely populated township nestled against the sprawling Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota. A handful of people who live in this small community are not scared of their wild neighbors, and for decades have left food for the bears.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Lynn Rogers’ Wildlife Research Institute in Ely, Minnesota. Every summer Dr. Rogers teaches 3½-day black bear field study courses here.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Debbie McNally, from North Carolina, puts her foot next to a bear paw to take a photo she calls “Bear Foot ... Barefoot?!”

J.M. Barnish moved there for the summers from Dallas, then quit her job in corporate finance, and now cooks for Dr. Rogers’ workshop classes as a volunteer. She and her husband feed bears in the back of their 11-acre home.

“I feel the most in line with everything in what’s called ‘the universe’ in the presence of a black bear,” says Ms. Barnish. “That’s my happy place.”

At Eagles Nest, Dr. Rogers established the Wildlife Research Institute and built a comfortable, three-story cabin in the woods. He began offering “field research” classes in summers to people interested in learning more about the bears. For $2,500, his participants can sleep in dorm rooms at his research center, learn his theories about bears, and greet and feed any of the wild bears like Jack that wander to his station.

“My biggest goal is education,” he says. In 2007, he took that philosophy a step further. He and his wife, Donna, borrowed money against their home and founded the North American Bear Center just outside Ely. “He needed a place to put his data. And I knew people would be interested,” says Ms. Rogers. She was right. 

In the sprawling center visitors wander among stuffed animals and hundreds of photos and videos, and read bite-size explanations of bear life – and the text and photos are almost all Dr. Rogers’, who is considered one of the top nature photographers in the state. In addition, the center has four rescue bears, formerly captive animals that were headed for execution. They live in a wooded 2½-acre enclosure and feed in a communal area viewable from the center.

“This is great,” says Cindy Hamaker, visiting on a recent day with her husband, Dean, from Siren, Wisconsin. “We see a lot of bears where we live, but we learned some things here.”

Dr. Rogers says he is pleased to have helped reform the image of bears, but he admits it is a difficult goal. “It’s hard for people to overcome their fears,” he says. “I think that we have a primordial fear of any animal that has bigger teeth.”

He proudly shows off pictures on the research center walls of his two daughters, before they were 10 years old, gaily feeding and dancing with bears. That is coexistence, he says. He is untroubled: “I knew there was no danger to it whatsoever.” 

Courtesy of Ahmad

Ahmad, who is only using his first name for security reasons, arrived at a New Jersey military base with his two sons in September 2021 before resettling in California. The former Afghan government employee evacuated without his daughter and wife, with whom he’s desperately trying to reunite.

Aida takes kicks to her stomach with a stone-faced focus. Her own kick has the precision of a whip, hitting hand-held pads with a thwack.

Between drills at the Monday night muay thai class, Aida breaks into a bright blue smile, mouthguard over teeth. She and sister Maryam are popular at the Denver gym, often smothered by classmates’ hugs.

“Without my family, it is so hard for me,” Maryam says in Dari, translated through her sister. But training here helps, “because they are like my family.”

The Afghan athletes landed in the United States in September 2021, a month after the Taliban swept to power and U.S. forces withdrew, bringing a chaotic end to America’s longest-ever war after 20 years. The Monitor agreed not to use the real names of Aida and Maryam for fear of reprisals from the Taliban against their family.

Like tens of thousands of others, the sisters are here on temporary humanitarian parole, resettled like refugees but without the same prospects for permanence. However, beginning next month, the U.S. will move away from this model, which allowed for speedier processing of at-risk Afghan arrivals.

Afghan evacuees across the country describe their first year here as a blend of gratitude and grief, resilience with the ache of separation. After all, forging new lives meant leaving loved ones behind – parents and siblings, for Aida and Maryam. And while Afghans have found safety in the U.S., without direct paths to permanent residence, many still seek a sense of security.

“I feel like I’m part of something good,” says Edrees, an Afghan parolee, about being welcomed in Kentucky. But then he asks, “What’s going to happen next?”

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Aida (center right) and Maryam (center left) drill during a muay thai class at a Denver gym, Aug. 29, 2022. The sisters, athletes from Afghanistan, arrived in the U.S. in September 2021 on humanitarian parole.

For starters, leaving family behind

Around 85,000 Afghans have arrived in the U.S. through Operation Allies Welcome, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 

In a late-August email, USCIS spokesperson Matthew Bourke said, “We are prepared to welcome additional Afghans over the coming weeks and months, including those who are at overseas transit locations awaiting clearance to come to the United States.”

Thousands were evacuated last summer amid haphazard scenes at Kabul Airport. 

“We didn’t have any choice, because we were in danger,” says Mahnaz Akbari, who resettled in Maryland. She used to command the Female Tactical Platoon in the Afghan National Army, elite soldiers trained by U.S. special operations forces. 

There was grim irony in escaping Kabul on military aircraft – similar to planes she used to love taking, province-hopping for missions. Some male Afghan colleagues who remained, she says, have been missing, imprisoned, or killed by the Taliban. 

“I wanted peace in Afghanistan,” she says.

Many like her, with U.S. ties, fled with the help of American contacts. Some became separated from family members amid the airport confusion. Ahmad evacuated on military aircraft with two young sons on Aug. 16, 2021, but couldn’t reach his wife via cellphone in time to have her and their daughter join from outside the airport.

“I was hopeless,” says Ahmad, who worked for the Afghan government and now raises his 2-year-old and 9-year-old sons alone in Los Angeles. (Like other sources in this story, he declined to publish his last name for security reasons.)

Ahmad is desperately seeking a way to reunite with his family, and has inquired with the U.S. government and advocacy groups. Whether at the beach or at a party, he says, “I’m just thinking of my wife.”

Prior to resettling across the U.S., many Afghans stayed for months on military bases.

Markus Schreiber/AP/File

At the U.S. air base in Ramstein, Germany, evacuees from Afghanistan wait to fly to the United States or another safe location, Sept. 1, 2021.

“Everybody got depression,” recalls Aida, who spent five months with her sister at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. She says some young women resorted to self-harm.

Aida and her sister settled into an apartment in the Denver area in March, among 2,545 Afghan evacuees to arrive in the state since July 31, 2021, according to the Colorado Department of Human Services. Nearly 9 out of 10 have been parolees like them.

Aida says six months’ worth of rental assistance has just run out, meaning the sisters are now on the hook for the $1,600 of rent. With a work authorization, Aida answers calls and schedules appointments at a dental clinic. But home is never far from thought.

“Whenever we go to our work and I see the families, they are talking to each other. ... I really feel sad,” says Aida. 

And yet, life here has also brought relief and newfound liberties. Sara, an Afghan Christian, says “of course” she feels safer in the U.S. She has resettled in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and has begun community college.

“I have freedom. I can go to work. I can do anything I want to do – and I can drive, like I couldn’t in Afghanistan,” says Sara, who shuttles herself to two restaurant jobs. 

After scoring her driver’s license last winter, “I was driving everywhere,” she says, laughing. “I was so happy.”

On a recent Saturday, Aida talks to a toddler in Dari on the gold-green carpet of a Northglenn mosque, about 25 minutes north of Denver. She’s just finished interpreting for fellow Afghans during an asylum workshop here. Aida filed for asylum herself earlier this year. 

“It really feels good for me to help,” says the Afghan athlete. 

Back in Afghanistan, she had worked to convince her parents that girls belonged in sports. The sisters ended up on a national team and competed internationally, but at the expense of pushback from neighbors and relatives – including one family member who cut ties with them.

Women’s sports seem unthinkable in post-U.S. Afghanistan, where Taliban governance is violating the human rights of women and girls “related to education, work, free movement and clothing,” according to an Amnesty International July report. 

During the asylum workshop, the prayer rooms of the mosque fill with difficult stories. Afghans describe what they’re fleeing to attorneys and other strangers, volunteers hunched over binders of paperwork as they help fill out forms. 

The stories are “very, very traumatic,” some involving torture, says Shams, an Afghan social activist who arrived in 2016. He also serves as an interpreter for workshops like this at Metropolitan Denver North Islamic Center, also called Masjid Ikhlas. 

Beyond the waiting game of asylum, there’s the issue of assimilation. While evacuees like Aida may be privileged with their skills in English, many can’t speak it – much less read or write in their native languages, says Shams.

News reporting from East to West coasts recounts Afghans’ added struggle of making rent in costly urban areas, especially for those who arrived with several family members to house. 

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

A baby crawls across a prayer room floor at Metropolitan Denver North Islamic Center in Northglenn, Colorado, during an asylum workshop for Afghan families on Aug. 27, 2022.

Tackling the bureaucracy

Of those 85,000 Afghan arrivals, more than 77,000 were paroled into the U.S. for humanitarian reasons, per USCIS. Unlike refugees and those granted asylum, parolees do not have a direct path to permanent residence and future citizenship. That means parolees may end up living in the U.S. unauthorized after two years if they don’t adjust their status. However, the Biden administration recently announced that, beginning Oct. 1, it will phase out the Afghan parole process – for which thousands of applicants still abroad haven't been approved – to prioritize long-term resettlement strategies. Immediate family of U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and resettled evacuees; Special Immigrant Visa qualifiers; and certain refugee program applicants will constitute the focus of resettlement efforts moving forward, according to news reports.

In the U.S., many parolees in pursuit of permanent residence have been trying for asylum, such as through the weekend workshop that began as a volunteer effort earlier this year, first reported by Denverite. Many applicants ask about family left behind.

“That’s the most common question I get, and the most heartbreaking one I have to answer, because there is no way to bring people over here from Afghanistan,” says Tracy Harper, immigration attorney and asylum workshop coordinator at Catholic Charities in Denver, whose volunteers have helped prepare over 300 applications. “My general advice is they need to get out and they need to apply for refugee status in another country,” she told the Monitor before news broke about the next phase of Afghan resettlement.

Ms. Harper’s Colorado Afghan Legal Project isn’t alone. As of Aug. 28, USCIS has received around 4,600 asylum applications from Afghan evacuees – including nearly 300 applications approved and one denied, according to the agency. (Though more than 430,000 such cases have been pending in an overall agency backlog covering many countries, USCIS is required to expedite asylum applications from Afghan nationals here on parole.)

Asylum-seekers must apply for asylum within a year of entering the U.S. Though the Department of Homeland Security has suggested that recently arrived Afghans may qualify for an “extraordinary circumstances” exception to this rule, lawyers like Ms. Harper continue to act with a sense of urgency, to be safe.

The legal limbo has also prompted advocates to push for the passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act. Introduced in the Senate in August, the bipartisan bill would let parolees who undergo additional vetting apply for green cards – similar to adjustments made for Vietnamese evacuees in the 1970s. 

Edrees in Kentucky, who says he faces “certain death” back home, wants the Afghan Adjustment Act to pass to end the uncertainty he and others experience with humanitarian parole.

“This is not the way you treat your allies,” he says.

A former Afghan translator for the State Department, Edrees applied for a Special Immigrant Visa in August 2021. He says he applied again this August due to an application denial that he believes was made in error – a denial by a federal agency that once employed him.

Frustrations with American bureaucracy aside, he doesn’t blame the U.S. for leaving his homeland after two decades. 

“U.S. mothers needed their sons back home eventually,” he says.

Plans, and hopes for the future

Like sisters Aida and Maryam, Edrees stays afloat by keeping busy. He has a job, which helped him buy a car, and has learned to cope with hard emotions by heading to the park. Edrees runs, and runs, and runs until he feels “good” again.

As a former lawyer in Afghanistan, he would like to attend law school here, though he’s aware of the expense. Sanga in Texas also has her sights on the future.  

“I have a lot of goals,” she says. Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston has helped resettle her family, which includes a son born a U.S. citizen this spring.

“I want a bright future for my children,” says Sanga, who was threatened for her work with the U.S. Agency for International Development. “I want to improve my education and get my master’s degree, Ph.D.” 

Likewise, Aida and Maryam hope to find college scholarships to begin studies here. 

Back in Denver, a tropical humidity hangs in the gym by the end of the muay thai class. Aida and Maryam finish crunches with the rest of the group, then joke with their coach and say goodbyes. 

“Everyone here loves them,” says Amy Reininger, who drilled with Maryam during practice. “They’ve been through so much, but they’re so inspiring to all of us.”

The sisters exit into the night, catching a ride back home. Their mother won’t be there to welcome them with a warm kidney bean curry or ask about their day. It’s unclear when that will happen again.

But they will be back at the gym tomorrow, back for a workout and more.

Melanie and I were on a quest. While on assignment in Manitoba, photographer and reporter set out to document the old-style wooden grain elevators that tower over this prairie landscape. It took Melanie poring over a map to pick them out. But at one time, farmers say, visitors could drive down the highway and see rows of them in their rearview mirror. 

The storage facilities, where grain would be loaded onto the national railway, have a connection with the world wars that ravaged the European grain market in the early 20th century. Production shifted to the Canadian prairies, attracting immigrants – many of them Ukrainians – who settled in towns next to the tracks, each community centered around its grain elevator that would stand as a beacon from afar. 

The number of elevators increased from less than 100 in 1892 to 5,500 at their peak in the 1940s, according to the Inglis Grain Elevators National Historic Site. 

Currently, only about 80 remain – with the majority having burned down or fallen into such disrepair they needed to be demolished. They’ve been replaced with modern facilities that point to the more industrial nature of agriculture today. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

An old train car sits on the tracks at the Inglis Grain Elevators National Historic Site in Inglis, Manitoba. This site preserves one of the last rows of standard-plan wooden grain elevators. The earliest examples date to the 1880s.

In Inglis, a row of five wooden elevators has been preserved at the end of an abandoned rail line. A plaque at the site describes them poetically as “prairie sentinels” that act as “the silent guardians of Western Canadian agricultural history.” 

But for us the real joy came from the elevators we stumbled upon – sighting an abandoned structure, tilting, with its paint chipped and letters missing from the name of the town it once served. 

Some people might see the dilapidated elevators – with their shattered windows and rotting wood – as a blight on the landscape. Instead, we marveled at what they represent: the passing of 100 years, testimony to a slower, and some would argue simpler, way of life.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A corroded nail stands out against the weathered wood of a grain elevator in Oakburn, Manitoba.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Once, thousands of elevators like this one in Oakburn were used across Manitoba to store grain. The grain was then loaded onto rail cars for transport. Now, only about 80 such structures remain, relics of an era of less-industrialized agriculture.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The “L” is missing from the town of Beulah’s old grain elevator.

Reuters

Semiconductor chips on a circuit board of a computer

Like China before it, the United States has officially launched a talent search to make sure it dominates an industry that lies at the heart of the world economy: the design and manufacturing of semiconductors. Those tiny logic paths with endless uses are the essence of every digital device – about 7,000 new ones are added to the internet every minute – from intelligent toasters to Apple’s latest smartwatch.

On Sept. 6, the Biden administration announced how it will spend $52 billion approved by Congress in the CHIPS and Science Act signed by the president last month. While the new law provides money to help build more semiconductor plants in the U.S., the long-range spending will go to broaden the talent pipeline of scientists, engineers, and others needed to create the next generations of ever-smaller, smarter computer chips. A new National Semiconductor Technology Center, for example, will try to coordinate decisions among government, academia, and the industry on what skills, training, and incentives are needed to create yet-unknown types of semiconductors. 

The issue for this $600 billion worldwide industry is not only a shortage of trained workers but also debates over what the sources for innovation and inventiveness are. The world is in a “talent race,” says Patrick Wilson, a vice president at chipmaker MediaTek, to give brilliant men and women the environment that they need to succeed in designing new technologies.

The competition for talent, especially between China and the U.S., is fierce. Semiconductors are seen as vital to national security as naval ships and nuclear missiles. Countries from Singapore to Britain have poured resources into creating regional “hubs” of tech innovation, subsidizing startups, and attracting foreign researchers to their labs. Yet despite this competition, nations also know that numbers and money are less important than creating a mental environment of freedom and openness that sees scientific imagination as an unlimited resource, able to break material constraints and the boundaries of human thought.

Creativity “is not a stock of things that can be depleted or worn out, but an infinitely renewable resource that can be constantly improved,” notes the authors of the 2015 Global Creativity Index. 

The global contest for talent in the semiconductor industry may be heating up. Yet by inventing new ways to attract and keep talented workers, the contest itself only helps expand the notion that there is no limit to talent.