After the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, several dozen former interpreters and other locals fled to Lithuania. Three years later, LRT.lt sat down with one of them for a catch-up.
“Laba diena,” Juma Gulas Yaqubi, an Afghan surgeon, greets me in Lithuanian. He helped Lithuanian soldiers in the Ghor province as a translator and fled to Lithuania in 2021 with his wife and children after the Taliban takeover.
“When the Taliban came, people didn't know what was going to happen, so we left for our children’s safety, for their education so that they could study and live in peace,” he said.
Yaqubi ran a hospital in Afghanistan and the decision to leave was not easy.
“Think about it, you have a house, a good car with a driver, and then you have to deal with leaving everything behind, even your clothes, and going to live in another country,” he said.
“I am happy to come to Lithuania, but the hardest thing was to start from scratch,” he said, adding that learning Lithuanian was one of the biggest challenges.
He passed his A2 Lithuanian language exam eight months after his arrival. He also volunteered for almost a year in the Kaunas Clinics Surgery Department and obtained a surgeon’s license suitable for the Lithuanian health system.
Currently, he works as a surgeon in hospitals in the towns of Prienai and Kaišiadorys.
“The first time I spoke to the [hospital] director, he asked if I could speak Lithuanian. I had experience as a surgeon, but it was a new place, new administration, new patients. The first two or three months were difficult, as it was hard to communicate with ordinary people because I knew the language from books,” said Yaqubi.
“But the hospital administration was very nice, everyone helped me whenever I had problems and little by little things got better,” he added.
At first, some patients wondered if the doctor had enough experience, and many were also interested to hear where he was from and why he came to Lithuania. “I have not seen anyone who says they don’t want me to do the surgery, they know in advance which doctor will do the operation,” he said.
Yaqubi now lives with his wife, three sons, and three daughters in a rented apartment in Kaunas. One of his sons, he said, was born after he moved to Lithuania. “I have one Lithuanian son,” the surgeon laughed.
Cultural differences
“We have Afghan friends, we all get along, our wives meet. We also have good neighbours, very nice neighbours, my wife talks to them. We live in a quiet place,” Yaqubi said, adding that he also has a friendly relationship with other translators who have come to Lithuania from Afghanistan.
However, most of them have settled in Vilnius and only a few are in Kaunas.
It was not so easy to adapt to Lithuania, where people are colder, according to Yaqubi. At work, for example, Lithuanians are very professional and only talk about work. Whereas in his hospital in Afghanistan, he said, everyone was like family.
“At work in Lithuania, we communicate only as co-workers and that’s it,” he said.
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