Clearly future John Hopkins material, this dude here.

Dear Friends & Colleagues.

I am pleased to share that I have been admitted to Krieger School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

Ranked among the top 15 universities in the world, this will be a life accomplishment I will always be proud of. This would not have been possible without recommendations from friends of mine that I hold in high esteem. I have already written to them privately to express my thanks.

Lastly, all of this would have been impossible without the support of my mother Khalida Maiwand-Azimi and my father Ali Azimi. To them, I owe everything that I am and will be. <3

Thank you Nona, Christy and Andreas. ^_^

I had not originally planned to write about this but I am speaking up now. The United States government is badly failing almost 100,000 citizens that had to be evacuated earlier this year – including my father. And I cannot stress this enough, this was at no fault of their own.

In the spring of this year governments and airlines suspended air travel throughout the world in an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19. Major airports went from bustling travel hubs to ghost towns in a matter of days.

Tens of thousands of Americans became stranded across the world. At the time my father was on a work trip to Afghanistan when air travel came to a screeching halt. What followed was what must have been a monumental effort on the part of the State Department to coordinate emergency evacuation flights for these stranded citizens.

For my family this was especially important seeing how by then, Iran was a major epicenter of the virus. We feared given the amount of migration between Iran and Afghanistan and the weakness of the Afghan health system, Kabul would soon be hit badly by the pandemic putting my father in danger of contracting the virus.

There were no flights and we had no idea when flights would resume. We were desperate to get him out of there. When it came to our attention that the U.S. Department of State was organizing evacuation flights, we leapt on the opportunity to repatriate my father back to the US.

Registering for the evacuation fight was not difficult. We had to log our father’s passport information on a link the State Department provided and wait for the message / call announcing the evacuation flight. However before boarding the flight he (and everyone else) was forced to sign a promissory note explaining that they would reimburse the US government for the costs of the flight.

In our case almost 2,000 USD.

At the time we thought it was some weird bureaucratic formality. Surely, the very same United States government we pay taxes towards to ensure our freedoms and safety would not charge us to provide and/or protect to those freedoms and safety?

It had a strong hint of Donald Trump’s protection racket approach to longstanding defense agreements. “Pay us for protection or else you’re on your own.”

At the end – it did not matter. Promissory note or not, my father (and many others) had to get on that flight. He signed and after a long and difficult journey across Central Asia and Europe, he eventually made his way home to New Mexico.

He escaped just in time. The very day his plane took from Kabul International Airport dozens of members of staff working at Afghanistan’s presidential palace (the equivalent of the White House) tested positive for coronavirus.

But fast forward to this month, my father received an E-Mail from the US Department of State demanding repayment and threatening punitive actions if he failed to reimburse the costs of his rescue out of Kabul on a deadline of August 30th.

This is an outrage.

Americans were not the only ones stranded. People across the world became stranded in the spring of 2020 and governments moved mountains to bring them all home. This ranged from wealthy nations like Japan to developing countries like the Philippines. My own girlfriend led many of these rescue flights for stranded Filipino citizens in her role as a senior flight attendant for AirAsia.

None of them, to my knowledge, forced any evacuee to sign a promissory note to reimburse the government for their rescue like our government has done.

Nor was this the first evacuations the US had conducted at that point. As early as January our government was evacuating citizens from Wuhan. There were evacuation flights on the 29th of January and 5th of February. Did these citizens need to promise to pay back our government for their own rescue?

Later on the 15th of February the United States evacuated over 400 hundred Americans stranded on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Did they too have to pay back our government for their salvation?

According to the State Department, “U.S. law requires that departure assistance to private U.S. citizens or third country nationals be provided “on a reimbursable basis to the maximum extent practicable.”

Perhaps under ordinary times this would be understandable. But these are not ordinary times.

Many of the evacuees (and again – my father among them) came home to a shattered economy and a hallowed out job market. Many of the evacuees are out of work and now they are being buried under with a bill for their own rescue.

There is a word for this kind of conduct by the US Department of State and it is: Grotesque.

The time is now up on the presidency of Donald J Trump.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1277431087489146881.html

It is my honor and pleasure to share news about the premiere of BLOOD ON THE WALL by my colleagues at Saboteur Media.

From Academy Award-nominated director Sebastian Junger and Emmy-winning producer Nick Quested, Blood on the Wall explores the depths of corruption plaguing Mexico and Central American.

For those of my friends here in the US, if you are interested to the premiere tomorrow please message me and I will be happy to provide you an invite link.

Following the online screening there will be a Q&A with directors Sebastian Junger and Nick Quested, moderated by NBC News and MSNBC Correspondent Jacob Soboroff.

May you grow up to be strong, wise and kind. <3