Perspective | A Virginia family took in a child refugee. Then his brothers came. (2024)

Could he have friends?

That teenager, Noorulhadi Noorani, who goes by Noor, recalled that initial conversation as he sat at the Hills’ dining room table on a recent evening. Nearby, three of his brothers worked on a painting and another sipped a cup of chai. They listened as Noor spoke with me in English, a language that he didn’t know a few years ago and that his brothers, who more recently arrived in the country, are trying to learn.

How the five brothers, who range in age from 8 to 21, all ended up living in Loudoun County is a story that starts with them getting separated at an airport in Afghanistan. Their family was one of the many that crowded the grounds around the international airport in Kabul in 2021 in hopes of evacuating as the United States withdrew its troops.

As Noor tells it, his father worked for UNICEF and his older brother served in the Afghan army, positions that made them targets of the Taliban. His family received three threatening letters and his brother was beaten repeatedly, once in front of their mother. The family went together to the airport and made it as far as the gates. There, Noor said, the Taliban stopped them and told them that they couldn’t go any further.

Noor was 16, and in that moment, he made a decision that would shift the trajectory of his life and, although he didn’t know it yet, his brothers’ lives. He saw a fountain inside the gates and asked if he could get some water. He was granted permission, but instead of getting a drink and returning to his family, he hurried toward the airport.

“They were calling me back, and I wouldn’t look,” Noor recalled of the Taliban. “I just kept going. I never stopped.”

Noor had no identification when he boarded a plane that took him to Qatar. Later, after it was determined he had no relatives to take care of him, he was brought to the United States where he stayed in a shelter, then a group home, before coming to live with the Hills in 2022.

“This family, I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me, and they chose to help,” said Noor, who is now 19 and a senior in high school. “I will never forget that help. It changed my life 100 percent.”

Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area placed Noor with the family. The organization helps find foster families in D.C., Maryland and Virginia for refugee minors who enter the country unaccompanied and migrant children who end up in the country alone.

“These are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable kids,” the group’s chief executive, Kristyn Peck, told me. Many of those children have been displaced by conflict or orphaned by it. Others have been trafficked or neglected. All have found themselves without a parent or guardian to take care of them, either temporarily or permanently, in a country they don’t know.

I ended up speaking with Peck on a recent afternoon about those children because the organization is facing a need right now. There are young people waiting for homes and not enough foster families. The organization places children in long- and short-term foster homes.

The organization, which receives funding from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, can accept 70 children but would need to add 20 foster families to meet that capacity, Peck said. The organization also plans to open centers soon in Virginia and Maryland that will provide schooling and other services to unaccompanied minors who are placed in short-term foster homes. She said they need families to sign up to take in those children as well.

“Unfortunately, given the state of our world and all of the conflicts happening around the world right now, I don’t anticipate the need going down,” Peck said. Children who are not placed in foster homes, she said, may have to remain in refugee camps, shelters or group homes. She said the organization welcomes all types of families, including single parents and LGBTQ+ couples, to apply to foster. “If they have the capacity and the interest in doing so, we want them at the table.”

My grandfather came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor at the age of 9. I have no idea who took care of him as a child. He died when I was still a kid, before I could interview him or appreciate what it must have taken for him to build his family in the same way he built my grandmother a house — from the ground up, without a foundation already in place.

After hearing about the need for foster families in this region, I asked Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area if I could see what an arrangement looked like. That’s how I ended up at the Hills’ house on a warm evening.

Mandy Hill said her husband served in Afghanistan with the Navy and his translator took good care of him. The couple hoped to help the translator’s sisters come to the United States and were devastated when they realized they couldn’t. They decided they could try to help another family and were waiting to take one in when they received a call they didn’t expect. They were told a teenage boy needed a home.

The couple had a daughter in college, another daughter who was about to finish 12th grade and a teenage son in high school when Noor came to live with them. He and their son will now graduate together.

Noor not only now has foster siblings — he also has biological siblings living nearby.

At the end of last year, his parents brought his brothers, ages 21, 17, 10 and 8, to Loudoun and rented a home. Then two weeks ago, his parents returned to Afghanistan for what Noor describes as family obligations. His brothers couldn’t go back without fear, Noor said. He recalled seeing people maimed by explosions on his way to school and hearing bullets pass by his head as he and his brothers slept on the roof of his grandparents’ house. He was so used to avoiding crowded spaces that for a while whenever he stepped into the cafeteria at his school in Loudoun, he had to remind himself that he was safe.

He didn’t want that life for his brothers, and they didn’t want it. They decided to stay, and the 21-year-old is now taking care of them. Since his family moved, Noor spends time with them every week, including some overnights. But he stays with the Hills to allow him to focus on his goals. (I was asked not to identify the brothers by name out of safety concerns for their family. Noor changed his name).

“There’s a lot in my life that I don’t want to remember,” Noor’s older brother told me through him. He said he wants his younger brothers to get the chance to do well in school and eventually “help people in this country the way that people have helped them.”

The boys are alone, but also not really. Noor and the Hills have been helping them. So, too, have community members and the children’s teachers. People have donated food, clothes and gift cards. They have provided jobs and English lessons.

“It makes me really happy to see my brothers here,” Noor said. “They’re happy here. We’ve never had a situation to be happy.”

Mandy said that if there is one thing that people who are considering fostering take away when looking at her family, she hopes it’s this: “If we can do it, you can do it. … We are not special by any means.”

She recalled the questions her family asked Noor that first time they spoke: What are your needs? What are your dreams? What are your concerns or fears?

Two years later, his answers have stayed consistent, she said. He didn’t have many fears. His dreams were to get an education and start his own business. And his needs he expressed with his own questions.

“He wanted to be able to have the freedom to go outside on his own and have friends,” she said. “He wanted to basically have what to us seems an average teenage life.”