Honoring Strength, Embracing Hope: Afghan Women Mark International Women’s Day

“We Afghan women are strong. We will never give up!” proclaimed Nabila to a room filled with 85 guests at AsylumWorks’ International Women’s Day celebration on March 10, 2025.

Purple flowers greeted guests at the door, while Afghan songs created a colorful backdrop in the evening. With the event falling during Ramadan, guests broke their fast together over steaming plates of Kupali pulao, Afghanistan’s traditional rice dish. Throughout the night, women and men took the stage to share speeches and recite poetry.

For these Afghan women, International Women’s Day has long been a day of protest and progress. Emerging from labor movements in the early twentieth century, it has become a global call for gender equality. For Afghan women, that call is more urgent than ever.

Since seizing power in 2021, the Taliban has issued over 70 decrees stripping women of their right to education, barring them from work, and erasing them from public life. Fearing for their lives, thousands of teachers, lawyers, journalists, and women’s rights activists fled to the United States in search of safety.

Now in the U.S., Afghan women exist between two worlds. They experience both gratitude for their safety and grief for what they’ve lost. They embrace new opportunities while mourning familiar comforts. They are reclaiming their power, but feel the weight of those still suffering back home. 

AsylumWorks serves as a bridge between these two worlds. This year, on International Women’s Day, AsylumWorks invited the Afghan women in our community to celebrate, recognize, and reflect on what it means to exist in two different realities at once. More than a celebration, gatherings like these offer AsylumWorks clients a space to connect and find strength in shared experiences.

As the evening concluded with games and raffle prizes, a complex truth remained: the individuals and families in attendance held both tremendous loss and remarkable strength. In communities like the one AsylumWorks has built, they find the space to mourn their past, the strength to embrace their future, and the support to carry both with them.