'We all want to get out': Mel Jones and an Afghan miracle

August 2021. Mel Jones has just touched down in Sydney after a stint working with Sky Sports in the UK. Jones, a 66-time Australia rep and a highly regarded commentator and presenter, makes her way through immigration. From there, she is bussed to a nondescript hotel in the heart of the city. With strict quarantine laws relating to the COVID-19 pandemic in place, this is home for the next two weeks.

"It was a tired old hotel, and I remember walking into this room," Jones tells cricket.com.au. "It was one of those ones where you couldn't open a window, and when you opened the blinds, it was smack bang onto another building – you had to arch your neck to see a little bit of blue sky."

Given the demands of her profession, this isn't her first quarantine since the onset of the pandemic. Familiar feelings soon spring to mind.

"It was: Here we go again," she says. "And I'm thinking: How am I going to keep myself busy?"

Jones has an old friend going through a cancer battle, and as part of a wider group she has pledged her support through his journey, promising to complete a fitness challenge in solidarity across the next two weeks.

"By the end of my quarantine," she grins, "I was going be able to do 10 handstand push-ups."

As she flicks on the news in her hotel room television, Jones notes that, in the Middle East, the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by the Taliban has displaced the ongoing COVID-19 dramas as top story.

Vision of desperate Afghan civilians trying to scramble onto planes at Kabul's international airport – some even falling from the sky – have captured the world's attention, as US and NATO forces withdraw from the country following two decades of occupation.

Jones is vaguely aware, too, that the Afghanistan women's national football team are part of the ongoing mass evacuation from the country – one that will ultimately see more than 100,000 Afghans and foreigners exit ahead of the Taliban's imposed August 30 deadline.

A day or so into quarantine, her phone buzzes. It's a WhatsApp message from Indian journalist Sharda Ugra, who is enquiring as to whether she knows any Afghan women's cricketers. Jones does not. Ugra then acts as an intermediary between Afghan cricketer Benafsha Hashimi – whom she is friends with – and Jones, sharing their contact details.

A short time later, Jones receives another message. This time it is from Benafsha.

"And all it said was 'Hi'," she says. "So I sent a message back saying, 'Look, I know you don't know me, but I'm involved in cricket in Australia. I don't know what we can do, but if you and the (other) players would like us to look into trying to get you out, I'm more than happy to see what I can do. But I can't promise anything'.

"She came back immediately and said, 'Yes, we all want to get out'."

Jones reads the text, and reads it again. In the small confines of her hotel room, the gravity of that simple sentence begins to sink in. And then an equally simple thought enters her mind.

"I don't know what to do."

*  *  *

Around the same time in Kabul, Nahida Sapan was attending a tutorial at university when she and her classmates were suddenly told they needed to go home because the Taliban had entered the city.

"It was the worst day in my life," Nahida tells cricket.com.au. "A dark day. A day when the light for girls and women in Afghanistan went out.

"When I arrive home, I cried. I was really scared. I talk with my sister, my mother, my brothers. It was a really bad time, we were all crying."

Nahida, an allrounder with the Afghanistan women's squad, was a baby when the Taliban was removed from power in 2001. More than two decades on, she was in her fourth year of university, and just a semester away from completing a degree that would allow her to become a PE teacher. In her work coaching young women, she had even discovered a couple of cricketers who would become her national teammates.

Nahida remains proud of that fact. Proud of what the strides she was taking in her life, which represented not only a career path for her, but a new way forward for Afghan women. But she was keenly aware of what the Taliban takeover meant.

"It was very sad for me, because we had a very good life there before the Taliban," she continues. "We go to the university, we have a job, we have a team. We had everything. But when Taliban comes, everything was over for us."

Quickly Nahida learned that she and her teammates were in direct peril. The Taliban was targeting, among other groups, Afghan sportswomen. As the team's scorer, she had a number of cricket scorebooks in her possession. She burned them, then hid her playing kit in the basement of her home.

"At that time, a lot of people saying something wrong about the team," she says. "I shared this with my manager. She said, 'Please, stay off your phone. Break your SIM. It's very dangerous'."

Nahida's story embodies the plight of many young Afghan women at the time. Indeed, a number of her teammates have relayed similar accounts, of hiding or burning cricket equipment or cricket-related documents such as contracts, registration papers, and certificates.

Yet those safeguards were only temporary measures. They needed to get out of their country.

"I was feeling terrified," Nahida says. "We were in a war zone."

*  *  *

Jones' first move was to assemble a coterie of the most reliable, proactive and well-connected women she knew. Women she could trust to act, quickly and quietly. The scale of the undertaking was monumental. In hindsight, Jones thinks perhaps her failure to immediately grasp that fact held her in good stead.

"Maybe a little bit naively, I thought: Well, the football girls got out, so it can't be that hard," she laughs. "Little did we know."

Her operations team included Emma Staples, whom she had worked with at Melbourne charity Red Dust Role Models, and Dr Catherine Ordway, an Assistant Professor in Sport Management at the University of Canberra. It would also come to include Cricket ACT chief executive Olivia Thornton, as well as a number of other individuals, in both Australia and Afghanistan, who will remain unnamed.

Critical to the process was the acquisition of 449 (Humanitarian) Visas. From her hotel room in Sydney, moving from bed to lounge to desk, while "finding different ways to stare at the same wall and doing the occasional handstand push-up", Jones liaised with Staples about how this might be achieved, and the logistical challenges they were likely to face in the application process.

Quickly a WhatsApp group was assembled. The conversation, between the Afghan cricketers, as well as Jones, Staples, Ordway and other key figures, became an unwieldy thread of documentation and desperation; as the Taliban took an ever-stronger grip on the city, the need for haste existed as a tense, ever-present undertone.

And so too was the need for secrecy. Jones and others were conscious of restricting the number of people on the WhatsApp group, citing a very real "fear factor" that even one errant whisper could make its way to Taliban ears.

Their next port of call was to establish exactly who – and how many – they might realistically have a chance of helping. Government advice effectively boiled down to 'the fewer, the better', so initially, they were looking at players, together with some coaching, support and admin staff. Yet the fact several players were underage was problematic; they simply couldn't be expected to leave their homes, flee their country, and settle in a foreign land all on their own.

"We said, 'Get the players and their immediate family'," Jones recalls. "And to us, 'immediate family' is something completely different to what it is in Afghanistan.

"So we're getting these lists of, 'Here's Player X, and here are 12 of her immediate family'. It was getting out of control really, really quickly."

Having established their key contacts – which included former Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne, House of Representatives Member Zali Steggall, several Australian government liaison personnel and a handful of anonymous Afghan security coordinators familiar with the lay of the land in Kabul and at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border – the women upped the ante.

"There was information coming through at all hours of the day," Jones says. "And it was constant – it just kept coming, 24/7, so there was no sleeping during quarantine.

"At this point, Catherine's doing a power of work, Em's doing all sorts of things to help – it was like a backyard immigration office basically, trying to keep track of everything, and then working with the Australian Government.

"We ended up with this list of 135-plus people, and we were like, 'This is not going to work'."  

The wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly. Complications arose. In many cases, the spelling of names or dates of birth on official paperwork did not match up with other forms of documentation. Sometimes, family names were completely different to what they had initially recorded. In one case, the identification of a set of twins caused no end of confusion. Some players had passports or forms of national identification, but many did not. And by this point, most of the women had gone into hiding, adding another layer of complexity to maintaining regular communication.

Nahida, for example, moved from home to home, taking refuge in as many as five different houses over a number of weeks as she sought to remain invisible. She was traumatised from the direct threats her family had received from the Taliban.

"If we find you," they had said, "we will not let you live."

All the while, she sweated on news from Australia.

* * *

Olivia Thornton was at a conference as part of a women in sport panel when she first got wind of what Jones and co were up to. Dr Catherine Ordway, whose path she had crossed at several of these sorts of engagements, was the one who first brought the situation to her.

"We did our bit up on stage and I remember coming back to the table and (Ordway) said to me, 'Actually, I need your help with something'," Thornton tells cricket.com.au.

"She said, 'I can't say too much, but I need to lean on your networks'. I said, 'Yep, not a problem', but then as I was driving home, I thought: My God, I didn't even know what I've just signed up for."

Thornton had been appointed Cricket ACT CEO around six months earlier, and her network in the nation's capital was tailor made for the task at hand. So too was her passion; the first woman to hold the chief executive role at Cricket ACT, she is deeply invested in ensuring the provision of equal opportunities for women in sport.

Initially, Ordway, wisely operating on a need-to-know basis, offered only the outline to Thornton.

"She gave me the elevator pitch of what they were working on," she says. "But she didn't tell me a lot, and to be honest, I didn't really want to know a lot, because at the time, the less people (who knew) the sensitivities, the better we were able to de-risk the situation.

"Then as things started to progress – and to use a cricket analogy – we became really clear in terms of the roles we were going to play. So my engagement became the hands-on component."

As the 10 Afghan families who would come to call Canberra home arrived, Thornton was there to meet them with care packages – exactly as Jones had done in Melbourne. If she couldn't show them around town or introduce them to people herself, she organised others to do so. Many of her plans around helping the newcomers settle in revolved around cricket, with a host of clubs welcoming the girls, who had bravely decided to separate and play with different teams in order to better assimilate into their environment.

"My first priority was just to try and be a consistent figure in their life initially, one they could ring at 3am if they needed to," Thornton says. "Then it became about the cricket as well, and trying to integrate them into the community as best we could, and as quickly as we could.

"These people have literally come with seven kilos of luggage – I mean, my work bag probably weighs seven kilos. They had nothing. No equipment. No shoes.

"So it was just about getting your head around all of that, and then leaning on our different networks – people provided vouchers for Big W and K-Mart to get them going, others taught English from their dining room table, some did the drop-off and pick-up from training and games, others helped by providing cricket equipment – we all just did our little bit.  

"For me it was a real reminder of the power of sport in these types of moments. To be able to activate our cricket community to help them integrate here was huge."

In that first 12 months, there was genuine fear among the families of retaliation from the Taliban, and so identities remained a closely guarded secret. When the women registered with their cricket clubs, they all did so under the surname 'Smith'.

"There was a real influx of Smiths in Canberra that season, which was actually quite funny," Thornton grins. "We still collected their stats – at the players' requests – but it was still quite sensitive."

Another enduring memory for Thornton is the gratitude that these women and their families – many of whom have now found employment, bought cars, and are living as regular members of the community – strove to show. She remembers arriving, with Ordway, to one family's home as dinner guests.

"We turned up and, I kid you not, I thought there must have been 20 people coming," she smiles. "I was a little embarrassed, because they've come here with very little money, and spent an absolute fortune putting on a banquet. We had to stress that they didn't need to do anything special for us.

"But they're so welcoming and they want you to come and enjoy a meal with their family, and it's also their way of saying 'thank you'."

In considering the selfless work of Jones, Staples and Ordway, Thornton sums up the prevailing sentiment among those who have ridden the highs and lows of this three-year odyssey in close proximity.

"They weren't asked to do this – there wasn't a mandate that they had to do it," she says. "But they're just wonderful humans who were prepared to put in the time, effort, and energy for people who they've never even met."

* * *

Jones was long out of quarantine when the news she and many others had been waiting on filtered through: all 135 Humanitarian Visa applications had been approved.

"That was pure excitement," she says. "But then you're faced with the question of: 'Well OK, but now how do we get them out?'

"I can remember so many of the WhatsApp messages (from the Afghan players) just going: 'We can't sit here any longer – we're leaving'. And then there's this conversation of, 'We suggest you don't, but we're not in your situation'.

"Then we're getting messages saying, 'Player X has had Taliban in her home, she's had to hide documents on her body'.

"There was so much pressure, because there was so much riding on this."

Attempting to ensure safe passage from Kabul to the border, and then into Pakistan, was an exercise in patience, faith and extreme caution. Jones insists much is owed to those faceless figures in Afghanistan, the names of whom even she never learned, as they established times and dates and routes that would give the players and their families the best possible chance of getting through the many checkpoints on their journey unchallenged.

One WhatsApp exchange between an on-the-ground coordinator and an Australian Government liaison reads simply: "Both [name] and [name] may cross tomorrow. I can organise transport and accommodation if you provide me with phone numbers, a crossing time and passports."

Jones insists the expert assistance was fundamental to their cause.

"We wouldn't have got the whole crew through without them," she says. "And I know there must have been so many close calls, like sliding door moments for each and every family getting through.

"Without their knowledge on the ground, it would have been impossible. And this was well and truly outside their scope, but I think it was just in their makeup – they saw an opportunity to help people, so they did."

It was life-saving work, as the challenges that cropped up were many and varied. As the weeks turned into months, the working group was at one point blindsided when they were informed that one family had been stopped at the border because their 449 Visas had expired.

"That was a stressful moment," recalls Jones. "We thought everything was going to come undone."

On another occasion, Jones was doing commentary stints at a match while simultaneously trying to ensure a family made it safely into Pakistan. This particular family had been another to receive direct threats from the Taliban. Refusing to simply wait in their homes and risk death, they had instead planned an illegal border crossing. If they could make it to Islamabad, they hoped the Australian Government would then be able to assist.

"I had the Fox producer sitting next to me in the control room, saying, 'What is going on?'" Jones says. "I said, 'I'm dropping a pin (on the Google Maps app on her phone)'.

"It was like something out of a Jason Bourne movie. (The player) is sending me photos of license plates, saying, 'Is this the driver that you've organised?' I'm like, 'That is not the car. Do not approach that car'. And I'm waiting for (her friend) to send me a photo from the driver.

"They finally got through, but because they had crossed the border illegally, Pakistan wouldn't allow them to leave. So we're saying to her, 'Pakistan is telling us that you have to cross back into Afghanistan', and the family was just like, 'There is no way known we are doing that'.

"So this family was stranded for around nine months in a hotel in Islamabad. It went through winter, and they only had summer clothes. We had to find different ways to bankroll their accommodation through different money transfers."

Only when pushed on the point does Jones acknowledge that she, Staples and Ordway were quietly footing the bill for this family's accommodation, their remarkably generous financial aid making its way to Pakistan through the expert logistical work of another unnamed party.

That selflessness is a snapshot of their overarching approach throughout this life-changing experience. Jones, the daughter of a schoolteacher and commission housing officer, who came to Australia from the UK when she was just three months old and went on to score a debut hundred in Baggy Green, thinks back to that initial request for assistance from the Indian journalist, Sharda Ugra.

"At the moment in time it happened, I don't think there was even a thought of: Why shouldn't I do it?" she says. "It was just: Well, why wouldn't you?

"These are people in serious need. Their lives are on the line. How could you turn your back on that?"

* * *

Nahida was at the Pakistan border with her sister and mother – their relative safety almost within touching distance – when news came through to her Australian helpers that the game had changed.

"We arrived there at 1am," she remembers, "and we are waiting all day."

After some of Nahida's family had already crossed safely into Pakistan, she was hopeful of the same outcome. Now, suddenly, the outlook was bleak.

"The Australian Government process changed partway through," explains Staples. "When it got to Nahida and her family coming out, we had to fill out another Visa form for them to cross the Pakistan border.

"It was a case of things becoming more complicated as time went on."

Nahida's waiting game extended to three months. She recalls it as a "very scary" period, during which her fear for her own life extended to those of her family, friends and teammates.

Ultimately, she was able to cross and make her way to Australia with Australian Government support. Nahida, her sister and her mother touched down in Melbourne, completed their two weeks' quarantine, then made their way out into a foreign world. Yet there were friendly faces to greet them.

"It's a very special time for me," Nahida reflects. "The most important thing for me was getting to know the kind people of Australia. I met Miss Emma, I met Miss Catherine. They are respectful women.

"There are challenges to life here but I never forgot that (kindness)."

More than three years on, Nahida and her family – particularly her mother – are continuing to work through the trauma from their experiences in Afghanistan, from the sudden and dramatic upheaval to their lives, through to the threats placed on them, and their changed circumstances as well.

"We talk a lot about mental health in cricket," Jones says. "Well, I don't how you get over something like what they've been through. How do you get the services and the right people to help you navigate the kind of trauma they've been through?"

Nahida misses her extended family, and her friends. She misses her home and her homeland. She mourns for all that has been lost, and the gender Apartheid many of her family and friends are now living through.

"It is very hard to talk about," says the 26-year-old, who spoke no English when she arrived in Australia. "I am in contact with a lot of girls there – family members and also my schoolmates and my university friends.

"Sometimes I talk with them and they say about the situation, and they are really sad, because it is really, really bad there. There is nothing for girls. Girls are not allowed to go to university. To school. To a park. They need a man to go with them. This is very hard.

"Because I leave Afghanistan and save my life, sometimes they ask how can they do something for themselves. But I can't give them a good answer. For now, I can't do something for them. It's really hard."

Since she landed in Australia, cricket has been a constant for Nahida. She and the nine other Afghan women's players who landed in Melbourne were registered with Carnegie Cricket Club, in the city's south-east. Some have moved on to Premier Cricket, but for all of them, Carnegie remains a welcoming and supportive home base – an avenue into a community in which they are now a small part.

Now they are readying themselves for a reunion with their Canberra-based teammates and tomorrow's match against a Cricket Without Borders XI. The women still have a deep-seated love for their country, and while they are not permitted to formally represent Afghanistan, they know who they are playing for. Their playing kit meanwhile, will bear a unique twin flower crest that combines the wattle and the tulip – the Australian and Afghan national flowers.

"I can't even begin to explain their excitement around this," Thornton says in reference to her Canberra crew. "(They're saying): 'We've been waiting for this moment. I can't believe we're going to have this opportunity. Where am I batting? (laughs)'.

"They are just absolutely pumped, and they're just so grateful. Hopefully this is the first of many cricket opportunities for them."

Nahida wants this match to mean more. She sees potential for it to build on a growing recent groundswell of international support for these Afghan women and their plight, which has shone a light on the inaction of the ICC.

"This match is very special for us, and not just for us – for all Afghan girls and women," she says. "Making hope for the future. They have lost a dream. I hope this will be not our first and last game. I hope we continue that and progress our future. There is a lot of meaning for us.

"We want this team. And we want the ICC to do something for us. It's very special to play one day for Afghanistan, and shine our future."

While Jones does not want to forget about simply enjoying this match for what it is, her ambitious nature also has her peering ahead to a world in which it represents the beginning of something of great significance.

"What we've said right along is that trying to get the girls together to play a game is what they've wanted to do," she says. "So this day is just purely about them.

"And for them at the moment, it's a stepping stone as well; there's a good cohort of them that want to be able to do this going forward, so this is the first step in the process of potentially forming an Afghan women's refugee team. That's what their focus is on.

"Further down the track … is there a Refugee World Cup for cricket? If we get this game up and going that, hopefully the conversation pieces can start: 'Well, what's next?'"