C.H. Booth Library hosted its “Acts of Valor Panel Discussion: A Marine & His Translator, and Housing Afghani Refugees in Connecticut” on Saturday, March 5. It was offered in person in the library’s Meeting Room as well as live through Zoom.

Jennifer Nash, assistant director of the C.H. Booth Library, moderated the event and introduced its panel, which included Newtown native and United States Marine Corps Captain Chris DiNoto, his Afghani translator Karim Ahmadi, and Reverend Dr Steven R. Jungkeit, who is the senior minister at First Congregational Church of Old Lyme.

DiNoto started off by sharing some of his background and what led him to meet Ahmadi.

After joining the Marine Corps right after college and doing multiple tours, he was selected for an advisor job that trains, organizes, and equips indigenous forces that the United States is allied with and provides security.

For such a multifaceted role, translators are important for conducting conversations.

“Karim is the guy I worked with all the time. I’m the intel guy, so anything intelligence-related and collecting information and reporting it. It’s a lot of stuff. He’s really my voice-piece that allows me to do that,” DiNoto said.

The two met in 2013 and after working together, DiNoto wound up getting out of the Marine Corps, moving to Newtown, and transitioning to selling software.

During that time, he tried finding different ways to get Ahmadi out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and to the United States.

“It’s just absolutely unacceptable to leave a member of your team behind under any circumstances. I, and all the rest of our teammates, never saw Karim as not part of our team … [Translators] are risking their lives. Once you become a translator, there is no going back. They know who you are,” DiNoto said.

He added that Karim in particular made a choice to not cover his face to show the people they were questioning that he was not afraid of them.

C.H. Booth Library Adult Programmer Kate Sasanoff asked Ahmadi what led him to become a translator for the United States.

“When I was 17 years old, I studied English in school,” Ahmadi said.

After seeing how the American forces were helping people, he applied as an interpreter to offer his skills, even though his mother had concerns for his safety.

Ahmadi noted how he was adamant that he wanted to work with the Marines.

When he met DiNoto for the first time, the two shook hands and soon found that they worked well together and formed a strong bond.

After an emotional journey, DiNoto was recently able to get Ahmadi to the United States.

Today, Ahmadi feels safe. He has an apartment and works in Newtown with DiNoto, as well as at a local business. DiNoto has helped Ahmadi acclimate to life in America — everything from teaching him to drive to explaining how credit cards work.

Ahmadi is thankful to Chris and the people of Newtown. He mentioned that he hopes to one day be able to bring his family to America, too.

Refugee Resettlement

Another component of the Acts of Valor panel discussion was Jungkeit’s input about his experiences helping refugees come to the United States.

He began by telling a synopsis of the story The Lifters by Dave Eggers. It begins with a child moving to a new town where there are massive sink holes that open up at any time and are big enough to engulf houses and schools. The people living there live in a constant state of knowing that at any moment everything can be taken away.

“I think that’s a perfect metaphor for the way a lot of us feel through life. We tend to know that at any given moment a crater can open up beneath us and the ground beneath our feet can disappear,” Jungkeit said.

In the story, the child finds that there are tunnels under the ground, and he becomes “a lifter” to stabilize the ground beneath the different institutions to save them.

“And that is a perfect metaphor for the kind of work all of us are called to do for one another … [in Old Lyme] we realized the ground beneath a lot of people’s feet all over the world were disappearing, sinking, collapsing. We also realized that individuals and communities all around the world have the capacity to be lifters: to get underneath that ground and re-stabilize people’s lives in different parts of the world,” Jungkeit said.

When he originally saw the refugee crisis in Syria, his community was one of the first to reach out to Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS) to bring refugees to Connecticut.

Within eight months, they brought their first refugee family to Old Lyme and had a variety of people helping to get them acclimated. They have continued to do this process to help Iraqi and Afghani refugees come to Old Lyme.

DiNoto added that he made sure IRIS was at the event today to highlight their amazing work. For information about IRIS, visit irisct.org.

The two-hour panel discussion concluded with a Q&A portion with audience members.

To read more about DiNoto and Ahmadi’s story, click here: “Newtown Resident, Former Marine, Rescues Afghans From Taliban.”

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Reporter Alissa Silber can be reached at alissa@thebee.com.