Leading the Way
Razia’s Ray of Hope flourishes under the guidance of an active board of directors:
Hawa Meskinyar
Having fled her native Afghanistan two decades earlier, Hawa Meskinyar returned to her homeland in 2000 on a personal mission to improve the lives of impoverished widows and orphans.
Upon returning to the United Sates the following year, Meskinyar founded Join and Help Afghanistan Now (JAHAN), a nonprofit humanitarian organization. The acronym JAHAN stands for a word that means world or universe in the Dari language. For her humanitarian efforts, Meskinyar was named the 2006 outstanding alumna at the Women’s Leadership Conference at Georgia Tech.
In 2002, Meskinyar married childhood friend Nadim Amin, who had re-established family business ties in Afghanistan. A year later she quit her job as a program analyst for the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health and the couple moved to Afghanistan.
In addition to her work as director of JAHAN, today Meskinyar is the Director of Administration for International Relief and Development in Kabul with a USAID-funded program.
