Whitman College Magazine Winter 2022

Leaving
Afghanistan
For first-year Angela Eliacy, the journey to Whitman started
with saying goodbye to a home she fears she may never see again
BY BHAVESH GULRAJANI ’23 | ILLUSTRATION BY MADI WELCH ’22
Angela Eliacy is a first-year Whitman College
student, an undeclared intended economics-math
major. She was born and raised in Afghanistan—first
in the countryside, then in Kabul—before spending
three years of high school in Japan. She enjoys boxing and
says she’s pretty good at it. And, she left for the United States
from Afghanistan just two days before the Taliban took over
her country. Her parents and nine of her 10 siblings remain in
Afghanistan, laboring through visa applications.
Afghanistan spent the 1980s engulfed in a war with the
Soviet Union, and at its conclusion were left without a central
government. Civil war ensued. The Taliban took over in 1996
and held power until 2001. “Those [five years] were some of the
darkest days in Afghanistan, especially for women,” Eliacy says.
The U.S. intervened in October 2001, nearly two decades
ago, bringing about a trillion-dollar war along with a dollop
of improved living standards: particularly for Afghan youth.
“Women could study,” Eliacy says. “I could go to school, I could
go study abroad.” Her generation could afford to live differently,
and more modernly—outside the narrow scope of the ‘traditional’
Afghan child.
However, Professor of History Elyse Semerdjian says, the U.S.
installed in Afghanistan “one of the most corrupt governments
on the planet.”
36 / WHITMAN MAGAZINE