We Have Come Home to Balboa Park

This morning, in the Hall of Nations in Balboa Park, the board of the House of Pacific Relations voted to welcome the House of Afghanistan. After a year and a half of paperwork and patience, we became an associate house — and in time, we will be a house in full. For the first time in this nearly century-old family of international cottages, there is a House of Afghanistan among them.

This is the first thing we have ever published here. So before I tell you what we are building, I should tell you who is writing, and how this began. Because the House did not start with a plan. It started with a question I couldn't answer.

Who I am

My name is Omed Habib. I was born and raised in San Diego in the 1980s, and so were all my siblings. My family was among the very first Afghans here — so early that I'd argue we predate the community itself. My uncle came out in the 1950s and used to tell me about renting a convertible Mustang and driving it through La Jolla. For all I know, he was the first Afghan ever to set foot in this city. That's how far back our roots in San Diego go.

My parents were among the fortunate ones who left in 1979. My father grew up in Afghanistan with posters of New York City on his wall — the skyline, the Statue of Liberty. My grandfather was an accountant for an international firm with business in India, so the wider world was already in the family's imagination. In hindsight, anyone who escapes a war is privileged simply to have escaped it — let alone to land in what I consider the greatest city in the world. My parents never took that grace for granted. They built a life here without knowing the language, and I can say honestly that they achieved not just the Afghan dream but the proverbial American one.

Growing up in San Diego, you live in a bubble. You don't realize the rest of the world considers it paradise until you leave — which I did. A short time in Los Angeles, nearly twelve years in San Francisco and the Bay Area, where I fell in love and married. We had our first child there before moving home to San Diego for good, and later had our second.

And it was here, as a parent, that the question found me.

The question I couldn't answer

One day my son will look at me and ask: What does it mean to be Afghan?

I realized I wasn't ready to answer him.

There's a second kind of bubble, one I'd lived in my whole life without noticing. When you grow up Afghan, raised by parents who grew up in Afghanistan, being Afghan simply is. Speaking Farsi is. The traditions, the ceremonies, the way you greet an elder — all of it just is. You never question it. You speak, you eat, you dance, you celebrate, you love. You go through the motions beautifully, and you never once ask why the motions exist.

I'm an engineer by training. You're taught early to approach any problem through first principles — and it turns out that's not only an engineering method, it's a way of moving through life. Somewhere in your education you're taught the idea of a proof: that 1 + 1 = 2 isn't something to memorize but something you can actually demonstrate, that there's a logical path to the answer. I had stood up when my elders entered a room my entire life. I had never internalized why. And now I was being asked to teach my son something I had only ever received through repetition and memorization. I would have to understand the foundation. I would have to find the proof beneath the practice.

So I went looking for it. The search led me to friends, to family, and especially to elders. And it brought me full circle to something I should have seen all along: the answers were never missing. They had been in front of us the whole time — carried across thousands of years of civilization, in the poetry, the idioms, the practices, the respect we hold for our elders. We've reduced so much of it to captions. People quote Rumi beneath a photo without knowing the depth of thought beneath the line. But the philosophy is still there, intact, waiting.

I began to see that the small things were never small. Taking off your shoes at the door. The good-natured fight over who pays the check. On their own they look like quaint customs. Put together, they form something closer to a sanctity — not a list of habits, but a coherent way of life, with reasons underneath that no one ever needed to say out loud, because the most important things our parents gave us often had no name.

And here is the part that matters most for this house: I came to understand that being Afghan is something separate from the country of Afghanistan. It is an inheritance of values, philosophy, and ways of understanding the world — older than any border, and able to outlive any of them.

The walk through the park

All of this was turning over in my mind just as we settled back into San Diego — the city I was born in, and a park I have photographs of from before I was even born.

In one of them it's the early 1980s. My mother is in her weekend dress, my father in bell-bottoms and a suit jacket, holding their firstborn. They had just arrived. They didn't know the language. They had no certainty about what the future held. And they are smiling — so proud to be American, so proud to be Afghan, so grateful for everything they'd been given, standing in Balboa Park at the start of a new life. They were uncertain about everything except hope. I can attest that they made good on it.

One day, walking through the International Cottages, I did what any Afghan would do. I looked for the House of Afghanistan.

It wasn't there.

That was the moment the two halves of my life met. All these questions I was trying to answer for my sons — and no representation of who we are in the heart of the city we call home. If I could bring those two things together, I could build something: a record of our culture, gathered with care, so that my sons would grow up learning what it means to be Afghan not from the world, but from their own elders.

Why this matters now

Because if they don't hear it from us, they will hear it from somewhere else.

There is a version of "being Afghan" that gets handed to our children from the outside — assembled from headlines about refugees, war, and burden. If that is the only story they're given, they will absorb it. They will learn, quietly, to make themselves smaller. People call that assimilation. I think the truer word is erasure — the slow trading of an inherited identity for a borrowed, mass-produced one.

The House of Afghanistan exists, in part, to intercept that. Not by arguing with the noise — that isn't our work, and grievance isn't our voice — but by doing something far more durable: gathering the real inheritance and making it legible, beautiful, and impossible to reduce to a caption. The best answer to a shallow story is a deeper one, told well, and kept where the next generation can find it.

What we are building

That is what gave birth to the Afghan Canon.

The Canon is the House's most important undertaking. It is not a blog or a collection of articles. It is a living repository of Afghan heritage — an effort to gather, verify, distill, preserve, and openly share the traditions, values, philosophy, literature, and practices that have shaped who we are, and to keep it free, in perpetuity. It exists to answer not merely what Afghan people do, but why. You can begin exploring it here.

The Canon sits inside a longer story — one older and stranger than most of us know. The Afghan presence in America doesn't begin in 1979. It begins with a man recorded as Mohammed Kahn, who immigrated in 1861 and fought through the Civil War, reaching Gettysburg in 1863; with Zarif Khan selling tamales on a Wyoming main street decades before the refugee era. From a few hundred souls at mid-century to a quarter-million across the continent today, this is a long arc — and San Diego became one of its largest homes. We've gathered that history honestly, including what we cannot yet know, and you can read it here. The fuller account of what the House is and what we're building lives here.

These days I measure my decisions by a single test, one simpler than any politics: what can I do to make the world a better place for my kids? That's the whole litmus test. How I vote, how I act, what I build — all of it runs through that one question. I'd put it up against any politician's. This house is one of my answers.

It will likely be a lifelong project. But what is parenthood if not a lifelong project? I'm signing up for it gladly.

What today actually means

A seat in Balboa Park is not a trophy. It is a foundation.

It means we now stand among nations who have spent decades building cultural homes in this park. It means a standing invitation to represent Afghan heritage at the lawn programs through the year, and eventually to take part in the park's beloved December Nights. And in time — this is the dream we keep saying out loud — it means a cottage of our own. A physical place where anyone, of any background, can walk in and encounter not a country, not a conflict, but an inheritance. Where a child can ask why, and find that someone took the care to remember the answer.

We don't have those walls yet. But a house is built by the people who show up for it. So if today moved you: come stand on the lawn with us, and bring your family. Follow the house on Instagram and LinkedIn, so you hear the story as it unfolds. And if you're able to help us build the institution itself — the Canon, the programming, one day the cottage — your support becomes part of the foundation the next generation will build upon.

To everyone who carried us to this day — thank you. To the House of Pacific Relations, for opening its doors — thank you. And to my parents, who stood in this park with a child in their arms and no idea what would come, and carried something across the world without a name for it: we learned to call it by its name. We're building it a home.

The work begins now. We begin it as a house.