Copyright 2017 by Atta Arghandiwal
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, translated, or transmitted in any form (electronic, photocopy, recording, or information storage and retrieval system) without permission in writing from the author and publisher.
Paperback ISBN 978-0-9978870-2-0
ISBN 978-0-9978870-3-7 (e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949584
This resource guide is designed to provide generic definitions, best practices, and helpful tips based on extensive hands-on experience and knowledge of the author as a refugee and an immigrant. The book is being published with the understanding that the author and the distribution company have not and will not be engaged in providing legal, professional, or financial advice. Readers must seek any legal, financial, and professional advice or services they require through appropriate professional resources.
Editor: Nina Shoroplova
Typeset: Greg Salisbury
Book Cover Design: Marla Thompson
Portrait Photographer: Edreece Arghandiwal
Published by Attamoves
Visit www.attamoves.com
This guide is dedicated to humanity with much love and admiration.FOREWORD
This incredible encyclopedia of resources affecting every dimension and decade of life provides guidelines leading to eventual success as global citizens, whether as refugees and immigrants or in our native countries. Atta Arghandiwal, a remarkable Afghan-American visionary, once a refugee himself who became a bank vice-president, inspires the reader to not just endure terrible hardships but to flourish during the many challenges of their new world, hopefully a kinder world.
Atta knows firsthand how to start over with nothing, to build a new life in a new country with basic English. He knows it because hes lived it. Wanting to spare the reader his experiences and mistakes, he guides us through every aspect of life, from the first breath to the last. He helps refugees and immigrants negotiate the complexities of a countrys systems from banking and insurance to education and health care. Please refer to Attas site www. attamoves.com for access to resources and links.
This book serves as a step-by-step blueprint for a successful transition whatever your path. This brilliant, compassionate, and practical leader has given all of us the gift of resources and support systems that enable the suffering to overcome the many challenges they face and to grow and thrive to be good citizens.
In addition to his humanitarian work, mentoring of youth, devotion to family, and business successes, Atta has provided training to governments, the United Nations, and businesses globally in best business and government practices, ethics, and humanizing the workplace.
Atta walks side by side with us from the moment we first think of leaving our home to seek a safer, better life for ourselves and our family. He helps us figure out, assuming we have time, how to get our affairs in order, saving what we can. Of course, if we leave under gunfire, running for our lives, hopefully some pre-packing has happened and we have grabbed what is most important.
What papers will you need? What to pack? What if we get stuck in a camp for refugees? Who should go and who must stay? Maybe youre pregnant or have a child whose health is fragile, maybe too fragile to bring along but whose very life is at stake if you stay. What about your grandfather who can barely walk and frequently wanders off? If you have a choice in where you go, how do you decide? What to do if you end up incarcerated? When you get to your host country, how do you survive?
Atta offers all kinds of little tips to make your journey easier. He encourages you to turn what you may see as a tragedy into a new adventure once youre on your way. This book should be with you at all times if possible. Some days you might need one part of it; another day, other sections.
Many immigrants start out and thrive as entrepreneurs, eventually becoming successful business people. In the process theyve learned the ways and laws of their new land and have filled out all the necessary paperwork and licenses if needed, paying appropriate taxes.
The changing role of women provides many challenges to entering a new world where those who wear scarves or full concealment are suddenly faced with half-naked girls and women walking around the streets, acting as if they are really dressed.
Mens fashions also leave a lot to be desired with their droopy pants and underwear showing. These fashions can cause a lot of stress in immigrant families where the generations clash and the authority of the patriarchal father is eroded.
Sadly, there is a lot of anti-immigrant hatred in our world and Atta believes that our community kindness circles as outlined in Global Kindness Revolution should be held in all organizations dealing with refugees and immigrants in particular. The directions are in Instructional videos can be screened on YouTube, so give it a try. Also included there is the Kindness at Noon for Refugees and Immigrants, Everywhere, Every Day, the KAN Technique.
These techniques of Vibrational Social Change are at the forefront of a new view of our challenges to discipline and contain our primitive MEAN MINDS while we nourish and encourage our more evolved KIND MINDS, aligning globally every day at noon as alerts go off on our devices. By 2020, more people will have smartphones than have indoor plumbing or electricity, so this is the first time we have the chance to align our minds in unison, powerfully neutralizing the negative energy that so dominates these times.
These are new things we can try, to change our heritage from planetary destruction to one where we acknowledge our common humanity and how we ARE capable of lifting each other up so we ALL succeed in healing ourselves and our Mother Earth. This book helps make us better people, more confident of the possibility of a better world for our children and our grandchildrens children still to come.
I plan to gift everyone I care about with a copy of this truly unique and valuable book.
Judith Trustone, author, Global Kindness Revolution: How Together We Can Heal Violence, Racism and Meanness.
PREFACE
The idea for this resource guideThe Self-Sufficient Global Citizen: A Guide for Responsible Families and Communitiesevolved over a long period of time, as a matter of fact upon my arrival in Germany as a refugee in August 1980 and my subsequent migration to the United States. Like every other refugee and immigrant, I needed a lot of information to start life in my new environment. I looked for a simple guide that would help me navigate my way through my new life and home, but I could never find one. In the first couple of years, the best things I could put my hands on were brochures and pamphlets. Eventually I was able to find some self-help books but most of them focused on just one or two topics, while others focused on such complicated matters that it was discouraging rather than helpful to read them. In addition, because this was before the Internet, it took a lot of time and patience to find out what I needed to know.
I often thought about creating a condensed lifestyle guide geared toward immigrantsa road map, if you willbut over time I got busier and busier. A couple of years ago, I succeeded in creating a comprehensive resource guide for immigrants to North America
