Sister Byrne is a member of the Little Workers of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, a religious order centered on service, prayer, and Eucharistic adoration, and who is based in Washington, D.C.
She previously served as an Army doctor for nearly 30 years, rising to the rank of colonel before her retirement. As a missionary surgeon, she has made numerous trips to help the sick in Kenya, Haiti, Sudan, and Iraq. In 2020, she was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention.
Byrne said she remembers having a great relationship with the Afghan doctors she worked with during her service in Afghanistan, many of whom spoke English well.
But when Dr. M’s plea reached Byrne’s inbox, at first her heart sank: she knew absolutely nothing about how to facilitate an evacuation.
“I’m nobody, really. I didn’t know how in the world we could help,” Byrne said.
So, she asked around. Soon after, a senior assistant to U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) put her in touch with Jason Jones, director of the Vulnerable People Project. Since the U.S. pullout, the group has been campaigning for donations to send coal to Afghans, amid fears that hundreds of thousands of children are at risk of dying in a cold, collapsed Afghanistan.
Jones told CNA that the VPP has been primarily focused on delivering food and coal to Afghans in need, but with a recent uptick in violent incidents against Christians and other minorities, they have pivoted their efforts to getting vulnerable people out of the country.
Using the network of trusted Afghans they had set up to deliver food and supplies, the group has been able to coordinate a number of overland evacuations.
“It’s a trust that we’ve built with people over time, and I think our food program has built us a lot of goodwill on the ground in Afghanistan, and people trust us,” Jones said.
The group is keeping many of the details of how it does evacuations private for safety reasons, but Jones said their team is largely built from Afghans they have rescued. Key among them is Prince Wafa, an Afghan and U.S. citizen who worked as a translator for the U.S. military from 2010-2014.
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Wafa told CNA that although he had been living in the U.S. since 2014, he was forced to travel to Afghanistan in late July 2021 to help his wife escape. That began a months-long ordeal whereby he was stranded in Afghanistan until October, after which he and his wife escaped to a refugee camp in Qatar, where they spent 40 days before making it back to San Diego in December 2021 with the help of the VPP.
Now, Wafa coordinates all of the VPP’s evacuations from Afghanistan, using familial connections because “those are the only people I can trust.”
“We’ve been fighting this for a long time now. We just try to do what we can,” he said.
When the VPP took on Sister Byrne’s request, Wafa’s team was able to deliver Dr. M, her children, and her grandchildren an aid package of food and coal within hours.
“We can get food and coal anywhere in Afghanistan within 24 hours, most places within four. So we were, within about four hours, able to deliver them food,” Jones said.
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