An Interpreter's Escape from Afghanistan

08/19/22 • 15 min

Marine Major Tom Schueman met interpreter Zainullah “Zak” Zaki while serving in Afghanistan. After Major Schueman’s tour ended in 2011, Zak continued to support the United States in spite of death threats from the Taliban. Zak applied for a U.S. visa in 2016. From 2016, Major Schueman launched a campaign to help Zak escape Kabul.

Brilliantly told in Tom’s and Zak’s alternating first person voices, ALWAYS FAITHFUL tracks the parallel lives of two men who each spent their childhoods in fear, peril, and poverty, and turned to war in attempt to build a meaningful future. Their experiences dovetail in Afghanistan’s deadly Helmand Valley, where they form a brotherhood, eventually culminating in Zak’s harrowing, eleventh-hour rescue.

Since first coming to America in fall 2021, Zak and his family have settled near cousins in San Antonio, Texas. But despite the dramatic and public circumstances of Zak’s escape, he still is battling red tape with the US State Department. As of April, his most recent visa application was rejected, meaning that his stay in the US still is not guaranteed.

Tom and Zak detail their experience in Afghanistan and Zak’s eventual escape in their book, "Always Faithful: A Story of the War in Afghanistan, the Fall of Kabul, and the Unshakable Bond Between a Marine and an Interpreter," and they joined us to share their story about friendship and loyalty.

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The Gullah-Geechee Community Is Fighting To Keep Its Culture and Heritage Alive

The Gullah (also known as Geechee or Gullah-Geechee) are descendants of enslaved West and Central Africans who were brought on slave ships to the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Their descendants retained many of their ancestors’ African traditions reflected in their arts and culture, food, and religion.

In 2006, Congress designated the Atlantic shores and sea islands from North Carolina to Florida, “The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor.”

One of those designated places is off the Georgia Coast, called Sapelo Island. On Sapelo Island, a small community of Gullah-Geechee people are struggling to preserve their culture, land, and future. They are descendants of enslaved West Africans, and their ancestors worked on plantations on the island until Emancipation, when they bought their own land.

The Gullah-Geechee originally owned land all over Sapelo Island and had several communities, but according to descendants, in the 1930’s, the North Carolina tobacco heir R.J. Reynolds, Jr. used coercive and exploitative tactics to move the Gullah-Geechee onto one part of the island called Hog Hammock (or called Hogg Hummock by descendants) — where they remain today.

In the 1970s, Reynolds’ widow sold most of the island to the State of Georgia, which owns 97 percent of the island. Descendants and others own the other 3 percent.

This is one of the last intact Gullah-Geechee communities in Georgia, and the number of descendants on the island is declining every year. Descendants say their people are leaving the island because they are slowly being driven off by state and county entities that are denying descendants basic municipal services, and increasing property taxes.

We spoke with Reginald Hall, CEO of Raccoon Hog Community Development Corporation and a descendant living on the island. Hall was not born on the island, but grew up visiting his grandmother. He was living in the Midwest in 2007 when his family called him back to his ancestral home to help his community and take an assessment of their survival.

Back in 2015, Hall and 56 Sapelo Island property owners, filed a federal race discrimination lawsuit which claimed that McIntosh County, the state of Georgia, and the Sapelo Island Heritage Authority were “engaged in a policy designed to make plaintiffs’ lives so uncomfortable that they abandon their homes and their land.”

In a statement to the AP, the county’s lead attorney in the lawsuit denied the county had discriminated against Hogg Hammock residents because they were Black.

Sapelo Island is located about 7 miles from the mainland, and its remote location has helped descendants preserve their Gullah-Geechee culture, but also made it difficult to live full-time on the island.

The only public access to and from the island is a state-run ferry, which only runs three times a day. It makes it hard for descendants to hold jobs off the island, and many end up working for the state institutions on the island. And the docks to-and-from the ferry, and the ferry itself, are not wheelchair accessible, meaning many of their elders cannot come to the island.

There’s also no school on the island, no medical services, no fire department, no trash collection. And on top of that, descendants’ lands are being threatened by developers and the resulting high property taxes.

In 2020, the state settled its portion of the lawsuit that descendants had filed in 2015. The state agreed to fix the aging ferry dock, and make the ferry and the docks ADA-compliant. The settlement is estimated to cost 19 million dollars in infrastructure rebuild, along with a $750-thousand-dollar payout to descendants.

And earlier this month, descendants settled the federal lawsuit against McIntosh County. The county agreed to station an emergency medical vehicle and emergency medical equipment on the island. The county will maintain and install a helipad for emergencies and evacuations, and provide a functional fire truck and firefighting training to residents who wis...

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Lebanon's Worsening Economic Crisis

In Beirut, Lebanon last week, an armed man took hostages at a bank because he couldn’t access his own money – funds he needed to pay for urgent medical care for his father. After an hours-long standoff, the man accepted a portion of the funds he was trying to take out of his bank account. The money was given to his brother in exchange for turning himself in and releasing the hostages. Meanwhile, crowds had gathered outside of the bank to support him.

This event underscored the deep economic crisis that Lebanon has been experiencing since 2019. According to the World Bank, it could be one of the “world’s worst economic crises since the mid-19th century.”

For more on this we spoke with Sarah Dadouch, Washington Post Correspondent covering the Middle East.