Neighbors in Marina form an unlikely connection with Afghan refugees.

As U.S. forces packed up and left Afghanistan last summer and Taliban forces quickly regained control, one man in the San Francisco Bay area was watching the news with a layer of personal fear. Monir (whose family has requested the Weekly does not publish their last name for their safety) had left home in Afghanistan 14 years earlier, became a software engineer, and visited home a few times to offer tech support to Navy Seals. His two brothers were still there, also helping the U.S.

“Our family mentality was freedom, to live in peace and get educated,” Monir says. “That was our motive: to support the U.S. cause in Afghanistan and eradicate international terorrism. [Our work] directly made my family a high-value target for the terrorists.

“We lived under the Taliban previously,” he adds. “We absolutely knew what life would be like under the Taliban 2.0.”

That gave a sense of urgency when it came to getting his family out of the country, but reality was that the odds were low in the chaos. Against those odds, on Aug. 23, 2021, Monir’s brother Nazir, with his wife, Samra, and two daughters, Hasenat (now 7) and Khatema (now 4) boarded a U.S. Air Force plane in Kabul to Abu Dhabi, where they spent the next nine months in a refugee camp. There, Nazir (who worked in the construction business, getting U.S. troops established in Afghanistan) and Samra (a teacher) taught English to fellow-refugees. And they waited. And waited.

In May, they were notified they had a sponsor, and they arrived at SFO where a man they had never met was there to pick them up. Bob Brunson is not a government worker or an expert on international relations – he’s just a regular person who lives in Marina, and who was tired of feeling helpless during a series of global crises.

“We felt so hopeless with Covid,” Brunson says. “Part of it is a personal thing – it’s exciting to do this. And what else would we be doing, playing bocce?” (They do play bocce, for the record, generally once a month.)

He and a group of neighbors (11 total) in The Dunes in Marina were getting to know each other, and Brunson proposed they pool their resources through the Sponsor Circle program, launched by the U.S. State Department and a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, Inc.

Participation requires sponsors to be background-checked, and to support a refugee family for three months as they get resettled – covering rent, groceries, bills. Some of it is logistics – for instance, they got Samra set with emergency Medi-Cal coverage, as she is expecting their third daughter to be born in July.

Some is financial. Their fundraising goal is $50,000, with the expectation that it will take more than three months to be truly independent. They have an Airbnb in Monterey reserved for the month of June, and are looking for a rental after that. To accept tax-deductible donations, they teamed up with Congregation Beth Israel. (You can donate online or via check, and acknowledge “Afghan Family” in your gift.)

Generosity is a common thread Brunson and friends discovered as they pieced together the essentials in anticipation of the family’s arrival in Monterey County on May 28. They posted on social media in search of a car, and someone donated a 2001 Infiniti. (The car donor sent them this note: “You are living out loud the love of god for taking care of the foreigner living in our land.”)

Brunson is a third-order Franciscan, meaning “I have taken a vow of chastity, poverty and obedience to simplicity and trying to repair the world.” It’s a guiding principle that he says moves him to help one family in a world that can feel beyond repair. Indeed, after the group got organized, Russia invaded Ukraine and a new refugee crisis began. (The Sponsor Circle program has since been expanded to resettle Ukrainian refugees.)

To illustrate his philosophy, Brunson tells the story of a girl walking down the beach after a storm, with countless sea stars beached. She tosses one at a time back into the water to rescue them. Someone approaches and snidely remarks that there’s simply no way she can save them all – there are thousands. She bends down to pick up another and return it to the sea, and responds: I helped that one.

“We’re not ever going to change the world completely,” he says, “but we do our part.”

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com