Across the river from Kingston, immersed in fresh air and birdsong and hidden amongst the trees, the student body at Bard College includes refugees from the countries of Ukraine and Afghanistan.
They are pursuing their degrees as part of an exchange program, It’s difficult to imagine a setting more incongruous with the lives they left behind — explosions and gunfire, regime change, and repression, coups and revolution.
Maihan Naimi, a 22-year-old Afghan, laughs easily in the conference room where she is interviewed.
“The Russians came. And then the Majuhadeen came. And then the Taliban came,” says Naimi. “So probably around twelve years for the Russians. And then the Americans for 20 years. So many invasions. They come and go.”
Raised in Kabul City, Naimi is proud to come from a military family. Her Father and her father’s father served her country. She has it all the time in the back of her mind, she says, the idea to return to her life there.
“But what would I do? No woman right now can work. No woman can study. They can’t have even a public life,” says Naimi. “They’re not allowed to go outside, sit in the parks or have fun. They’re saying that women are not here in this world to have fun. The basic human rights that a woman needs in a country, the Taliban has taken everything from the woman.”
In case there was any ambiguity under the new rule of the Taliban, America’s on-again off-again ally in the region, supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada abolished the ministry of women’s affairs outright.
“Oh, my god,” said Maihan. “I don’t know how the Taliban got control! The Minister of Defense was calling to the courts and bases, telling them to fight. But they had been told that we shouldn’t fight. And the way that they took control! The Taliban was just on motorcycles. Trust me, they didn’t even have shoes on their feet.”
During the evacuation of the American forces, Naimi left with her family, crammed in with 700 other refugees in the belly of an enormous cargo plane. The Taliban assumed control of Afghanistan on August 16, 2021.
“It was very cold, and we did not have a place to just sit really well,” says Naimi. “I was the person who stood up to stretch out my legs, and then everyone stood up. In a day and a half we went to a military base in Bahrain and from Bahrain we came to Virginia, to Dulles.”
Everyone wore color-coded wristbands. Red wristbands were for those with special immigrant visas, who had worked with the U.S. government directly. Blue wristbands were for the people who had no documents.
“This was very famous,” laughs Naimi. “Whatever papers people had with English writing, anything, they would just take it to the airport. People came with just their electricity bills.”
Naimi wore a white wristband, issued for those who worked in top positions of the Afghan government or their relatives. Maihan’s father worked in the defense ministry and her mother worked with the National Security Council of Afghanistan.
After fingerprinting and documentation, after the wristbands, they were scattered across the continent. To Fort Lee, to Fort Beacon. Maihan and her sister in America, her parents to Canada, the family was without passport or status, separated by the border to the north and unable to cross.
Olenka Tsyhankova, a 20-year-old student from Ukraine, did not come on a military plane. When the Russians invaded Ukraine, when they started firing rockets, when everything was topsy-turvy, Olenka, along with her mother, her 13-year-old brother and her dog, walked the 70 kilometers [43 miles] from Lviv to the Western border alongside other families also fleeing in the hope of crossing to Poland. They began the trip in daylight and ended more than twelve hours later in darkness. It was February 25.
Anyone who’s ever broken down on an interstate highway has an idea of what it’s like. Only they probably weren’t carrying bags of their essential belongings with them.
“We tried to cross the border on foot,” said Olenka, “but too many people were there. Hundreds of them, sandwiched between two rows of buildings. There were students from other countries who didn’t really understand Ukrainian. So they didn’t understand that there is a rule that first women and kids and then men. So they started pushing the gate. And that’s how everything happened. They heard a gunshot and started running in every direction they could. The guy, he didn’t shoot anyone, he shot in the air, but nobody saw what happened. Some people were trampled in the stampede.”
So they turned back. Walking back into Ukraine past a Poland-facing queue of cars 20 kilometers long, the weather below freezing. Well after sunrise they had been able to hitch a ride to a bus station where everyone fell asleep, Olenka next to the family’s bags.
“My dog is a half-Corgi, half-terrier. Tiny,” says Olenka. “I don’t know how she survived the walk.”
While Lviv is a city on the western side of the country, away from the spear head of the Russian invasion, there is no real distinction between the battlefront and the rest of the population.
“It’s safer than on the eastern side, but nobody gets all the missiles,” says Olenka. “No matter where you are in Ukraine, it could still happen. The emotional and mental condition of people, it’s not good.”
Both Olenka and Maihan share an essentially militaristic understanding of society as they appraise the value of soldiers and guns. The attitude does not seem to be popular at the liberal-arts college.
“For now, my plans are to join the U.S. military,” says Maihan. “Nobody likes you to share your idea of saying this here. They think it’s because of killing people or this or that. They’re like, would you like to go to the battlefield? To be honest, for me, I have been raised in such a place that war was all around me. Bombs were around me. It seems very normal to me, to go and fight for a country that’s really in need of people.
With gender-based discrimination currently insurmountable in her country, joining the American military is a practical decision for Maihan. But Olenka, the student of art history, intends to return to Lviv in spite of the missiles after her semester is through.
“For Ukraine, this war did not start last year, or even nine years ago,” says Olenka. “We have always been fighting for what was always our independence, our right for existence. I see a lot of connections between the Ukrainian thing and the Native American thing, like our destiny or what you would call it. We are a nation that has been colonized for centuries … separated between Poland and Russia, with the Russian regime much more harsh. The Polish were like Austro-Hungarian, so that’s more freedom on the western side rather than on the eastern side. People who were closer to Russia, they have less connection with Ukrainian culture, authentic Ukrainian culture, and Ukranian language, because Russia has always influenced that and still tries to prevent us from fully integrating ourselves in Europe.”
Olenka’s experience has left her totally prejudiced against the Russian people, whom she considers carefully brainwashed.
For the soldiers, her judgment is cold and rational. “They’re stealing and adopting our kids,” says Olenka. “Around 20,000 Ukranian children right now in Russia, “adopted” from Mariupol and other cities in the eastern side of Ukraine. How am I not supposed to hate them?”
In Olenka’s world view, the responsibility for each country’s people to overthrow their badly behaving rulers is objectively absolute. The failure to do so makes people complicit in the acts perpetrated by their country’s leaders. Cheerleading certainly, but standing by and watching also makes one a collaborator. If American’s accept the fact that Russians are guilty for who is involved, says Olenka, and those not doing anything to stop it are also guilty, then Americans must accept their share of responsibility for something they did not start but have the power to stop.
Olenka was able to get out of the country on the second try, following an itinerary that under different circumstances would arouse envy, passing through Krakow, Prague, Berlin, Paris and ending up finally in Torre la Mata, a tiny enclave of full of expatriates from larger Europe on the Spanish coast of the Mediterranean. They stayed at the house of her godmother for four months before her brother and mother decided to return to Lviv. Olenka went to South Bend, Indiana, ending up at Notre Dame before arriving at Bard.
Though she has enjoyed her studies, there is a problem with her college. The sound of the air raid siren used by the local fire department to summon the volunteers to car accidents or house fires carries far through the air over the campus. The siren can go off at any hour.
“I was in Ukraine for only a week and a half during the war,” says Olenka, “but I think that sound is engraved in my brain. Even though our conscious minds understand that we are away from war, our subconscious tells us to run and hide whenever we hear it and freeze in fear. I don’t think that Ukrainian students who are coming here will be happy to hear it.”
Olenka says she is one of ten Ukrainian students at Bard, with ten more expected for the following semester.
Naimi’s path to Bard ran first through New York City which was closer in spirit to Kabul, a city of five million. Over the summer, she had been installed in The New Yorker Hotel to take part in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs program, At first, Naimi found the shift in the fall to new digs in the peace and quiet of the Bard campus disconcerting.
“When I came to Bard I got depressed. I had never lived in a rural area,” says Naimi. “When I got a scholarship, I was thinking New York City! And then coming by train up the Hudson River, and it was like, where am I going? It was so hard. We were three girls, and they all put us in a very far dorm in the north of the campus. And we were all alone, not taking any classes. In front of our eyes, everything changed from a hundred to zero. That was a hard time.”
But after she had passed through a realm of doubt, says Naimi, her point of view shifted. To be able to resume her education, with the return of classes, then Naimi found the campus like an opened flower. The future she saw for herself before regime change came, once again belongs to Naimi.
And then more students were arriving from her country as well.
When she first came to the campus, Naimi recalls, nobody knew about Afghanistan.
“When they would hear my accent, or me not speaking English very well, they would ask, ‘where are you coming from? Oh, Afghanistan? Oh, cool. They would look at each other. Nobody knew until our community got bigger and bigger. Now they know so much about the country. There are 50 plus Afghan students at the college now.”
From her vantage point in the Hudson Valley, Naimi swings between hope and hopelessness for her country. Grateful for the activity of various organizations in Washington, DC, which through protests call attention to the situation in Afghanistan, she is also skeptical that protests and fundraising alone will really change the reality on the ground.
For now, having received her asylum approval, Naimi waits for the official documentation which will allow her to at least cross the border into Canada to visit with her parents. The rest of her family is scattered far and wide across the globe, in Dubai, Pakistan, Germany and Belgium.
While Naimi is not aware of a sizeable Afghan community in New York City she knows about the mosque in Kingston.
“Most of the Afghan students here go. I was planning to go,” says Naimi, “to perform my Friday prayers, but I have class at that time. Religion is important because it keeps me in a framework, culturally, but I’m not a particularly religious person. As you can see, I’m not wearing any scarf. I would say to my sisters, ‘oh, my god, it’s so hard to fast!’ But no, I can do this. I have done this all of my life in Afghanistan.”
Naimi does get over to Kingston, however, to the Center for Creative Education on Cedar Street, volunteering her time teaching computer programming to underprivileged children.
“At first, I started it as Girls Who Code, but when I saw the little boys also, they were coming all the time, I was like, no, it should be kids who code, so I changed the project name. Everyone should be allowed. Everyone has the right to study.”
Which tracks with the world Naimi expects and prefers, the world she experienced when she was a child.
“We could go to schools. We could just go to picnics and live outside,” says Naimi. “We had all the rights.”
When her semester is over, Olenka will head back to Lviv. She accepts the reality of rocket fire. Her anger warms her.
“The bigger issue with the war that is happening right now, is that [the world] doesn’t understand that the regime will not stop. Even after Ukraine. It will move further because that’s what’s been happening for years and years. There’s Georgia, there’s Chechnya. Russia has been invading other countries continuously. It’s just there was no social media before that to actually show it.”
Russia invaded Ukraine and occupied Crimea in February 2014, ultimately annexing the region in retaliation for the ouster of the Russian puppet-president Viktor Yanukovych during what the Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity. Olenka rules out giving up Crimea in exchange for permanent peace.
“That’s just not the case for Ukrainians. We don’t do that. The goal is to get the whole area free,” says Olenka. “And that’s exactly what’s going to happen. I mean, even if it takes years and years and years and years.”
She acknowledges it will take a long time to rebuild the cities that are completely destroyed, that the efforts of planning and logistics will be difficult. No matter where she is, she says, she is still trying to do as many things as she can to speak for Ukraine, and have her voice heard wherever she is.
“So many terrible things are happening everyday during the war. but there are some peak moments that hit the emotional stability of all the Ukrainians very hard. And one of those moments was when a huge rocket that was 20 meters long [60 feet] hit a residential building. And there were pictures of the building completely shattered, and a woman on the fifth floor next to her bathtub [was] just scared because she opened her eyes and there’s the world. The wall, her home, is not there anymore.”
“When I’m sitting here listening on the phone to my brother crying to me because he saw the rocket hit a few kilometers from our home, and then there’s someone sitting in front of me complaining about how expensive gas is .… It’s definitely not the biggest problem in your life, but I get it …. Even though I know people will not understand at the level as we need them to, it’s still better to speak than remain silent and not do anything.”
Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday February 24, 2022.
As of May 24,2023 it has been 454 days.
Malia DuMont interview
War in peace with the vice-president of strategy for Bard College
“While the immediate demands in education are for the training of men for the war effort, liberal education in America must be preserved as an important value in the civilization for which the war is being fought.”
— Passage from Bard College’s 1943 catalogue
Rokosz Most: I understand you were in the military.
Malia DuMont: I am in the military. I am an Army Reserve officer. I enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1999 and I became an officer in 2003. I’ve been in the Army Reserve since the beginning. I’ve never been full-time Army except for when I was activated and deployed.
RM: The newspaper was interested to hear a little about the long history of Bard encouraging or aiding war refugees to attend the college. Hungarian students, for instance after the revolution against the Russians in 1956…
MD: At the bottom of the stairs in this building, as you came up, there’s an enormous poster that the Hungarian students made. It’s beautiful, and just sort of giving honor to those who welcomed them here.
RM: And there other periods of time when refugees have come here to Bard?
MD: I think we’ve always welcomed refugees. We have a special relationship with Myanmar So there are a number of students and alumni we have, who came here from there, and some of them have gone back. One of them has been under house arrest since the coup happened. So it’s been a couple of years. President Botstein [of Bard] himself is a refugee. He was born in Switzerland, he’s an immigrant and it’s not just the students that we welcome. Our staff also includes some refugees. We have a threatened Scholars Program.
RM: What is that, the threatened scholars program?
MD: Threatened scholars initiative. When you look at places like Ukraine and Afghanistan, it’s not just students who are at threatened but those who teach them. We’ve also brought threatened scholars from those places to get some jobs here, partly because these students need people who are from their own cultures to help them integrate but also those people need jobs, too. Because they’re not able to continue in their original place. It’s a campus wide effort to welcome refugees. We have a sanctuary fund for that. That’s been going on for a very long time.
RM: Is that typical of universities and colleges or is that kind of specific to Bard?
MD: We give them much more financial aid than most institutions do. 70% of our students receive financial aid. And the average award is over $40,000 a year.
RM: I’m very interested in that intersection between arts and the military. There’s an irony to me that without the military you don’t have a vibrant art life. The soul and the civilization of art, it needs to be protected. And yet, the way to protect it is usually by force or by discipline — conformity might be the wrong word. But I can’t think of a good military that doesn’t have a top-down hierarchical structure. Discipline is important. Everyone has to do what they’re told at the time that they’re told to do it. And that’s very antithetical to art and the creative process.
MD: I don’t think these worlds are as far apart in some ways. And there are a lot of artists in the military. These things aren’t in opposition to each other. Some of the best poetry comes out of war. Which is not an endorsement of war, but when you go through extreme and difficult situations one of the ways you have to deal with it and process it is art. So I think that it’s a natural, symbiotic relationship.
RM: Personally, I think stress and the negative experiences of life are essential to art. I’m not saying anybody should be bombed either. But those who have, they have an insight to what the military is there for. So you have this bulwark that’s protecting whatever the soul of the civilization is. If you don’t have the art, I don’t know what you’re protecting. And then maybe that’s totalitarianism.
MD: Right. There’s a balance to be held between these things, when you get so much on the protection side, that there’s nothing left to protect. That becomes a problem. We could get into a whole other discussion about the impact that ending the draft had on the military and on American society. Probably not what you want to talk about.
RM: Are you in favor of compulsory military service?
MD: I’m in favor of the all-volunteer military, and I think that’s the way to go.
RM: So you don’t think we should have a larger percentage of the population serving in the military?
MD: I do think more people should serve. But I think not compelled.
RM: You’re familiar with the Israeli model. So you know, while you have to serve in the military, you don’t necessarily have to be on the front lines.
MD: I don’t think anyone should join the military thinking, ‘I’m joining but I hope I never have to fight.’
RM: But there’s people that aren’t good fighters, and they shouldn’t be you know…
MD: You don’t want to go into this thinking there’s like ‘the military that’s really the military and then there’s the military’. No. You’re either joining and you’re getting the rifle like everyone is. I had to learn how to throw a grenade in the Army. Everyone has to have those basic ideas like you’ve got to know how to protect yourself and the others around you, and you are not immune, no matter what.
RM: I feel like that makes you comprehend what the military is then in ways that people that aren’t in it never will and I find that’s a problem in our society. Is there a hope that the refugees coming here have their lived experience shared with the people that have never been bombed?
MD: In a way. The refugees that we’ve been welcoming here in many ways they are the future of their societies. And most of them probably hope to go back and rebuild the community they came from. And what we want to do is help them. Because in a war situation, survival becomes the top priority. And people forget how important education is. The fact is the devastation of war endures longer when people don’t have access to education to help them build their way out after the war ends. So that’s the kind of impact that we hope to have. Now, there’s also the added benefit for the other students here, the benefit of being in a classroom with such a diverse group of people, diverse experiences, it means your assumptions are constantly challenged, that you think maybe that the refugees are illiterate, and it turns out, actually, the refugee sitting next to me in a classroom is more articulate and a better analyst of reading than I am.
RM: One of the refugee students I interviewed said she was interested in starting a club with you and finding other students that were interested in such things military. Do you feel like talking about that?
MD: We have had one. Before Covid, we had a military interest group on campus. And there were a bunch of students in it. And several of them went into the military after graduating, and this is in the past couple of years. One of them went to the Marine reserve, and other one is in the Army. I’m in the Army not because I want there to be wars in the world but because I want to help prevent wars and end them as quickly and peacefully as possible.
RM: That’s very close to a war is peace kind of situation there, in order to have peace, we have to have a strong military. So I think it’s because it’s almost cognitive dissonance or it’s having two ideas in your head at the same time…
MD: I think it’s about deterrence. If you care about how international affairs works, this is one of the things you need to think about, just as you need to understand basic economic forces in the world. You can be unhappy with capitalism, because it’s unfair in a number of ways. You can try to make it better. You can be unhappy that that wars happen. You know, but militaries aren’t going away.
RM: Because if no military, then no us. I can anticipate a criticism against recruiting on school campuses, People really don’t like that. If you have a club of military interest, how is this different?
MD: Because it was a student initiated club, students said they were interested. And nobody’s forced to come to this club. It didn’t get any funding from the student. It was just a bunch of students getting together talking about what their career interests were.
RM: It seems like a risky time, in our political climate. If it was as simple as saying, if you don’t like it, don’t read it. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it. If you don’t like it, don’t join it. That argument doesn’t seem to be working very well.
MD: Well, they accepted it here.
RM: Who is they?
MD: The president [of Bard] is very supportive of us. I mean, his family was World War Two Jewish refugees from Europe. He’s talked publicly before about how grateful he is for how all the different forces came together to enable him … and part of that was the U.S. military.
RM: Did I hear Bard was considering a satellite campus over in Kingston?
MD: Oh, yeah, we’ve been we’ve been talking about this for decades, I mean, it’s more than just gossip. I’ve met with senator Schumer a couple times on the iPark 87 site. Because it’s the closest city to our campus, a lot of our people live there, a lot of our students shop there, spend time there, volunteer there. It’s a major focus for our efforts. I want to clarify it wouldn’t be a satellite campus, in the sense that we’re going to pick up some things that are here and move them over there. The idea is a graduate STEM campus. That’s what we hope to create.
RM: Is it coming along?
MD: We’re working on funding
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