BRATTLEBORO — Nowruz is an important and special day in Afghani culture. Have you ever heard about this celebration?
On March 20, 200 Vermonters celebrated the holiday with the new Afghan refugees who have been supported in the Brattleboro area since we had to leave Afghanistan. We have been coming to Vermont over the last few months.
On that Sunday, the first day of the new solar year, we celebrated many different traditions with people of Brattleboro and the area. We celebrated with the support of these Vermonters and with the warm embrace of the staff of the Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC).
Nowruz goes back thousands of years in some Middle Eastern countries. Over its long and illustrious history, it has held a special place in the cultures of Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan.
In these countries, we celebrate this day with different traditions. In Afghanistan, people get ready to celebrate this day in special ways. As the first day of the new year approaches, they buy new items for their children and for themselves. They buy new home appliances for their houses.
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What makes Nowruz most memorable are the foods and decorations. Women cook special and delicious foods, and they make special sweets to greet people coming to their houses as guests.
Kamila, one of the new Afghan refugees in Brattleboro, cooked lunch for this big celebration of Nowruz.
She cooked different foods such as qabuli palaw, roast chicken, and three kinds of kebab.
Qabuli palaw is a special Afghan food with rice, chicken, pistachio, carrots, spices, and olive oil. Most of Vermonters loved the abrishum (silk) kebab, which had an aromatic smell of saffron and cardamom and is a particularly special traditional Afghani food.
Kamila also prepared haft mewa, which is made of seven dried nuts and fruits soaked overnight in warm water. We eat the nuts and fruits with a spoon and drink the sweet water.
Since the food is the main part of this celebration, Kamila felt happy because she was cooking - and, as she was one of the cooks, all the Vermonters thanked her. They were very happy with the Afghani food, which they had never eaten before.
“The next day, when I went to my English class, one of my teachers stood up and kissed me,” Kamila told me. “She said she was grateful for the special traditional food.”
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On Nowruz day, Afghans decorated the International Center (IC) at the School for International Training with lots of flowers, lights, and candles. It looked very luxurious and beautiful.
They also made a special arrangement on what we call the Haft Sin table, including seven symbolic edibles and non-edibles that start with the “s” sound in the Dari language: vinegar (serkah) for patience, apple (seeb) for love, oleaster berries (senjid) for blessings, garlic (seer) for health, wheat sprouts (sabzi) for rebirth, a sweet paste made of cooked wheat germ (samanu) for affluence, and hyacinth flowers (sonbol) for spring.
Many of the Afghans spoke of how different an experience it was to celebrate Nowruz here, because it was the first time that most of us have celebrated among many foreign people.
Last year, Akram celebrated Nowruz among thousands of people back home.
“Last Nowruz in Afghanistan was amazing for me, but the security conditions were different,” he said. “I felt more peace here this year than in Afghanistan last year.”
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After people finished eating the delicious food, I noticed they were sharing love, having conversations, and then dancing together to Afghani traditional music. Outside on the terrace kids were making and flying kites.
Vermont State Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun, a member of the Rockingham Area Refugee Resettlement group, said that it was an honor to join with people from Afghanistan new to the state, volunteers from the community and staff from ECDC to celebrate this beginning of a new year.
“Having the community gather at SIT to eat, dance, fly kites, and connect with one another was an extraordinary experience,” she said. “The folks from Afghanistan have so much to offer to our community. The celebration was one way the new arrivals could share their culture with Vermonters.
“I witnessed both joy and sadness on that day as new friends joined together and many longed for loved ones still in Afghanistan,” Bos-Lun observed.
Bonnie Mennell, a teacher on the SIT faculty, said that there was such joy and pride and beauty and happy voices in the air when she walked into the International Center that afternoon. It has been quite some time since that meeting and eating space has felt so alive, she said.
It felt good for her to be coming to a celebration of the promise of spring and the new year that has meaning for all the amazing Afghans living and studying on the SIT campus and seeking to make new lives here.
“I saw so many loving and warm interactions between sponsors and community volunteers and the families they have come to know so well in this short but intense time of entry and adjustment,” Mennell said.
“I know there must have been hard moments during this festivity for so many family members are back home in Afghanistan,” she continued. “And this is still a 'strange new land' of unknowns on so many levels,” she said.
All the Afghani people who celebrated Nowruz here have many sweet memories. We are hopeful that we will be celebrating it here in Vermont for many, many years to come with all of you kind Vermonters.