Elizabeth Titus

I am devoted to helping the current generation of Afghan women, ages 16-30, become literate, educated and secure, positioned to lead their country out of three decades of devastation.

I began as a mentor for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project five years ago, and soon moved on to sponsor a 16-year-old girl from Kabul who came to America to attend boarding school. Sabira is now a sophomore at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, on the dean’s list, majoring in economics and Arabic. Her goal is to work for the IMF or World Bank and return to Afghanistan to help rebuild the economy.

I was in my late fifties, retired from a long career at American Express in New York City, a recent widow and an empty nester to an adopted Chinese daughter. I felt despondent, alone, with no hope for a second act.

A chance meeting with a young Afghan woman named Tabasum at a dinner party in 2009 led me to my passion. When we met, Tabasum had just graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont and was en route to Oxford for graduate studies. Today, she is director of admissions for American University in Kabul. Tabasum is the reason my life took a turn that I would have never dreamed of.

Recently, some close friends brought my mentee Sabira’s younger sister to America to attend boarding school. And in October 2015, I got an email from an Afghan woman I’d mentored via the writing program, who worked in Kabul for an American NGO. While at a conference in a European capital, she got a death threat from home. Through friends, I found her a place to live, and traveled there to meet her. She arrived in Europe in the midst of the largest refuge crisis since WWII, and how I found my way into the heart of it still stuns friends. She is now working to help other refugees as she awaits legal status. I am in close contact with her and admire her courage.

The young Afghan women who often stay at my home in Connecticut (six this past Christmas!) do not consider me ancient or over the hill. To them, I am youthful, alive, generous and kind. Often self-deprecating, at last I have seen my own value to others. By helping women from the most dangerous place on earth to be female, I am doing a small part to change the world.