Qayoom Hessan is happy now that his mother has come to Lee’s Summit from Afghanistan. Among other things, he believes she can help his children — eight-year-old Mina and four-year-old Hugo — keep up the language of their heritage. He doesn't want them to forget Dari.
Hessan arrived from Kabul in 2016 after winning a United States Diversity Visa; his status allowed his wife and Mina to join him in 2020, and Hugo was born here.
After Hessan became a citizen, he filed a petition for his mother to come to the United States. She arrived late in 2023.
“My kids can communicate in their native language," Hessan said, "and I hope they get better.”
He enrolled them in an online course managed from Pakistan, where they learned the Dari alphabet.
“At home, we talk in Dari,” Hessan said. “Sometimes when we call our relatives outside, like my sisters and other siblings, we communicate in Dari.”
Speaking more languages, he believes, will make his children better communicators overall and provide them with more social and other opportunities. It will also keep them connected to their native culture.
“I do not like it when my kids want to visit our original country, they need a Dari interpreter,” he said.
Hussain Ali Nazari is among a group of people working to create an organization for members of Afghanistan’s Hazara ethnic minority in Kansas and Missouri. He said keeping an immigrant community’s native language alive is important culturally as well as economically. His group’s members have had several discussions about how they can reduce worries about their children not learning the mother tongue.
“In our community, between people who come from Afghanistan and resettled in Kansas City, Missouri, and other close neighborhoods of this city, we usually talk in Dari but unfortunately most of the children participants do not understand,” Nazari said. “It is because they speak English at school, they watch movies in English. This is something that we are concerned about.”
Andrew Vogel, who directs the office of International Student Services at Avila University and teaches English to new arrivals, said preserving native languages for third-culture kids in Kansas City poses a challenge.
"It's typical within a community for children to be more influenced by the language they speak. To maintain their native language, immigrant parents play a crucial role,” he said.
Vogel advises parents to have conversations with their children in their first language, and use online resources and apps designed for kids.
Over the past three years, Jewish Vocational Services assisted 518 refugees from Afghanistan who arrived in Kansas City, said resettlement case manager Alissa Fortney-Tombaugh.
Most refugee assistance agencies have only translation and interpretation services for their clients, but not language classes. Jewish Vocational Services provides interpreting and translating services in about 32 different languages, according to Maria Alicia Rodriguez, who manages the nonprofit’s interpretation services. Dari is now among the most requested languages, she says, along with Spanish, Arabic, Swahili and Burmese.
"Finding Dari interpreters had been a bit of a challenge before 2021 since then it hasn't been as much,” Rodriguez said. “When the wave of Afghans started arriving in Kansas City we had a lot of people reaching out wanting to help and be interpreters.”
Currently, she said, JVS works with about six Dari interpreters who are independent contractors.
Aziz Mosawy’s family arrived in Missouri as refugees from Afghanistan in 2016. His son, Sayed Muqtada Mosawy, was two years old at that time, and now he is almost 10. All of his children speak English, Mosawy said, but Muqtada cannot communicate with his aunt, other honorable members of their family outside the United States or other relatives.
“I sent my family on school break to Pakistan where my father-in-law’s family lives. That was one of my goals for my kids to improve their speaking skills in their native language by talking with their grandfather and grandmother in Dari. It was not a successful experience,” Mosawy said.
He also enrolled his kids in an online course where a person outside the United States teaches them the Dari alphabet, but he said the class has not met his expectations.
Mosawy said he wishes members of Kansas City’s Dari-speaking community would join in working to preserve their language. Decades from now, he said, the regret of this cultural failure will make immigrants bitter.
Hessan agrees. He encourages all non-native English speakers in Kansas City to do what they can to help their kids learn their native language. For immigrant groups, forgetting that language will be a cultural setback, he said, with negative social and economic impacts on the next generation.
