A growing diasporic community will puff out its proverbial chest next week, as the Colorado Afghan American Association holds its first celebration of pride and culture in Lone Tree.
The event, “Afghanistan Day in Colorado: A Cultural Celebration of Community and Unity,” happens on Tuesday.
It will be a day Afghanistan’s food, dance and art will all be on display.
Some of the foods people will be able to sample include kabuli pulao — a traditional dish of rice with beef or lamb inside it, covered with carrots and raisins on top; mantu — an Afghan version of a dumpling with beef and onions inside served with a garlicky yogurt sauce on top; and one entree many non-Afghans will recognize: kebabs — beef or lamb marinated on skewers and cooked over charcoal.
For anyone who wants to burn off some energy after sampling traditional foods, there will be a way to do so: dance.
“We do a traditional dance, ‘attan,’ that is basically a dance that we do,” said Mary Bahramand, a Colorado Afghan American Association board member, who came from the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, to Colorado in the 1980s at the age of 2 and now lives in Denver and works in human resources.
She’s not sure if she’s going to participate in the dancing, where different genders move separately from each other: “Men are going to be dancing, usually it’s in a circle, and they do a lot of the jumping and the twirling … it gets pretty intense,” she said.
Afghan clothes, which will be both modeled and sold by vendors, include details that are different from tribe to tribe and location to location, she said.
Also on display will be handcrafted textiles, art, jewelry, and traditional crafts by local Afghan artisans.
”Usually it’s hand-sewn napkins, jewelry with metalwork and a stone on it,” Bahramand said, adding that some pieces for sale and display will be made by Afghan people who live in Colorado, and others will be shipped here from Afghan artisans.
She said the location in Lone Tree allows the bulk of Colorado’s Afghan diaspora to be in close proximity to the event.
“The majority of the Afghan community live in Denver, Aurora and the Thornton/Broomfield area,” she said, adding that based on her estimation, the population, whose base number she was not sure of, has seems to have doubled in recent years.
The event’s goal is for attendees to meet people of the Colorado Afghan diaspora and to “connect with cultural representatives, and participate in short presentations on Afghan heritage, achievements, and ongoing community-building,” Bahramand said in a press release.
Founded in 2023, the organization promotes and supports Afghan Americans and their culture statewide, and the event, which is free, begins at 6 p.m. at Meadows Banquet & Event Center in Lone Tree.
“This opportunity is a chance to be able to step into another world, Afghanistan, where memories and connections will be made,” according to Bahramand. “Understanding, learning, and compassion for one another will be planted in our hearts and minds.”
