MUMBAI, India – As the Taliban consolidates its takeover of Afghanistan, most Catholic Church workers are seeking ways out of the country. Many of them, including priests and nuns engaged in humanitarian work, are from India.

Jesuit Father James Regina C. Dabhi, the director of Center for Culture and Development in Gujarat, was formally the director of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Development Institute and visiting professor at Herat and Bamiyan Universities in Afghanistan. He left the country in 2011.

“The first time I went to Afghanistan in 2008 was at the invitation of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) and the NGO department of Afghanistan and I was the director of Indian Social Institute in Delhi so I had gone to train their staff mainly on the concept of civil society organizations,” he told Crux.

“In 2009, I volunteered to work in Afghanistan, and I moved through JRS, and we established a Afghanistan Research and Development Institute (ARDI), and we worked from Kabul. Our main aim was to get involved in social sciences and get more engaged in academic programs in universities so that students from Afghan universities get more engaged in social issues of their country and impact policy making and hopefully bring about change in the life of Afghanistan. In those days, poverty was very high – 50 percent or more – there was gender insensitivity, and little understanding of democratic politics,” he recalled.

Now Dabhi is concerned about his Indian confrere, Jesuit Father Jerome Sequeira, who has headed the Jesuit Refugee Service in Kabul since January 2021 and previously worked with Dabhi in the country.

“Father Jerome was a great support and he himself was engaged in primary school education with Afghan children in Bamiyan – there is a place about 30 kilometers away from where Father Alexis Prem Kumar was kidnapped – we used to go there and get engaged in the school which the government had given as to intervene and bring up the education. We did a lot of educational work, some of the Jesuits were more engaged in primary school education; myself and others were more at the institutional and academic Institutions.  Jerome mastered the local language,” he said.

Sequeira is now stranded in the country near the Kabul airport, the scene of chaos as people try to flee the country in the wake of the Taliban takeover of the capital. He is with another Indian Jesuit, Father P. Robert Rodrigues.

On Tuesday, Sequeira was able to send out a message, as reported by The New Indian Express.

“We managed to suspend activities on time and ensured the safety of all our staff. Anyway, safety does not make sense here. It is a chaotic situation,” the priest said.

“I had to drag my luggage through a large crowd and vehicles on the road [to the airport]. Thousands of people are trying to flee. The Taliban were shooting in the air and trying to control the crowd. People were boarding flights without any security check or boarding passes. It was a terrifying experience,” he added.

Jesuit Father Stany D’Souza, the head of the South Asia Jesuit conference, issued a statement saying the order has a crisis management team with international experts.

“We meet regularly to take stock of the situation and to offer moral support to Father Jerome and Father Robert. Arrangements will made for our men to return to India as and when it is possible,” he said.

“It is certainly a difficult time for us. It is one more tragedy that has hit us. I am sure that you will storm the heavens with your prayers that our men will have sufficient faith and hope to withstand the crisis and that they can return home,” D’Souza said.

Dabhi told Crux that Sequeira is “a down-to-earth person and simple in his approach.”

“He entered the lives of the people with his very simple, he was very approachable good person for children to relate and I enjoyed working with him and he is good friend and companion,” the priest said.

He noted that he, too, would be in Afghanistan if it wasn’t for the pandemic.

“In April this year, Jerome sent me a a message to come and start something in Afghanistan and especially in Kabul [at the university] … I initially said yes, but here [in India] COVID was rampant, so I told Jerome to hold on.  Last month I heard of the evacuation of people and American forces moving out,” he said.

“I am concerned about him, I pray for our Jesuits in Afghanistan,” Dabhi said.