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 I want it to say not only what happened today, but why any of it matters.

Let me begin with a photograph.

Before I left for the vote this morning, I had breakfast with my father. When I told him what the day held, he got up, crossed the house, and came back with a photo album. On its cover is a picture of him in 1981, standing in this same Balboa Park, beside my mother and my older sister—their firstborn. Forty-five years ago. They had arrived in a new country, in a new city, carrying what they could.

What they carried was not luggage. It was an inheritance. And like most of their generation, they did not yet have the words for most of it.

That photograph is the whole reason this house exists.

A story older, and stranger, than most of us know

When we imagine the Afghan story in America, most of us begin in 1979—the Soviet invasion, the refugee decade, the families who rebuilt their lives from nothing. That story is real, and it is ours. But it is not where the record begins.

The first Afghan-connected person found in American records was not a refugee. He was a Union soldier, recorded as Mohammed Kahn, who immigrated in 1861, fought through the Civil War, and reached Gettysburg in 1863. A man born in Persia and raised in Afghanistan rests today beneath the headstone of the army he served. Decades later, a Pashtun man named Zarif Khan was selling tamales on a main street in Sheridan, Wyoming—"Hot Tamale Louie," beloved by a frontier town half a century before the word refugee attached itself to us.

For most of a century there were almost none of us here—a few hundred souls, a scholarship student, a name in a courthouse ledger. Then, almost all at once, there were many. From a few thousand in 1980 to a quarter-million across North America today, with the largest arrival in our history still settling into its new home after 2021.

San Diego became one of the largest of those homes. We gathered this history carefully, from primary records, and we were honest about its gaps—because to gather is also to admit what we cannot yet know. You can read the full account here: the Afghan story in America. I'd ask you to read it not as someone else's history, but as the long arc that your own family's photograph belongs to.

What we actually inherited

Here is the quiet problem at the center of all of this.

A diaspora rarely loses its culture in one stroke. It loses it in fragments. We inherited the food, the language, the celebrations, the advice from our parents, the customs at the table. We inherited the what. We did not always inherit the why.

The first thing a culture loses is not its customs. It is the reason for them.

The House of Afghanistan was not founded because Afghan heritage is beautiful—though it is. It was founded because there is a break in transmission, and a generation of us grew up holding pieces of something larger without the context that once held those pieces together. Many of us only felt the weight of that when we became parents ourselves and faced a simple, enormous question: what should we pass on?

So our mission is plain. The House of Afghanistan exists to ensure that future generations inherit more than fragments—by preserving, documenting, and carrying forward the philosophical, intellectual, and cultural inheritance of Afghan people. We are not here to recreate the past or freeze it behind glass. We are here to recover the meaning beneath what was handed down, so that it remains useful—something the next generation can question, live by, and carry further. If you want the fuller account of what we believe and what we are building, it lives here.

The Canon

The most ambitious thing we are building is called the Canon.

It is not a blog or an encyclopedia. It is a living repository of Afghan thought, art, and memory—the first sustained effort anyone has made to gather, verify, distill, and openly share this inheritance, and to keep it free, in perpetuity. It is organized into six threads: wisdom and thought, traditions and customs, language and meaning, poetry and expression, home and hospitality, and history and heritage.

Its first volume has already begun, and fittingly, it begins at the table—a master record of Afghan cuisine, because the table is where so much of the inheritance was kept alive when nothing else could be. But the Canon is the work of generations, and it cannot be written by a handful of us. It is built by the people who carry the knowledge: scholars, elders, artists, cooks, translators, and the simply curious. If your life touches Afghan heritage in any way, the Canon would be honored to hear from you.

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 alongside the rest of the international community. And in time—this is the dream we have not stopped 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 do not yet have those walls. But we have the beginning. And a house is built by the people who show up for it.

So if today moved you, here is how to be part of what comes next. Keep an eye on our events—come stand on the lawn with us, bring your family, bring your neighbors. Follow the house on Instagram and LinkedIn, so you hear the story as it unfolds. And if you are able to help us build the institution itself—the Canon, the programming, and one day the cottage—your support becomes part of the foundation that future generations will build upon. Every family that gives first becomes part of the record of how this began.

I am grateful beyond words. To Sue Omar, our vice president, and to everyone who carried us to this day. To the House of Pacific Relations, for opening its doors. And most of all to a generation who carried something across the world without a name for it—and trusted that one day we would learn to call it by its name.

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

With gratitude,

Omed Habib
President, House of Afghanistan