Author Spencer Sullivan: Not Our Problem: The True Story of an Afghan Refugee, an American Promise, and the World Between Them
Kingstowne Regional Library 7130 Silver Lake Blvd , Alexandria, Virginia 22315
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In an Afghan village, a boy learns his letters under a mullah’s stick and dreams of a life free of the Taliban; in Virginia, a cadet learns to read a map and lead a platoon into combat. Years later, on a wind-scoured ridgeline overlooking Zabul Province, helicopters roaring overhead, Afghan interpreter Abdulhaq Sodais and U.S. Army Lieutenant Spencer Sullivan must learn to trust each other if they hope to survive.
In 2021, when the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan, the Taliban reassert their rule, disappearing, torturing, and killing U.S. collaborators, including Abdulhaq’s fellow interpreters. Yet Abdulhaq’s applications for asylum in America are repeatedly denied.
With the Taliban closing in, Abdulhaq embarks on a cross-continental trek toward freedom. Caught up in the global refugee crisis, Abdulhaq must surrender himself to safehouses and human smugglers while Spencer fights his own war back in the U.S. to honor America’s promise.
Not Our Problem, a war memoir and refugee story revealed in alternating voices, follows an Afghan refugee and an American soldier across borders and continents, tracing the long distance between a promise and its keeping—interrogating a world in crisis while celebrating how friendship can outlast the war that created it.
