In December 2024, Waheedullah Elham arrived in Sacramento with a wife, a two-year-old daughter, and $100. A friend had donated the money as county benefits would start in January. He knew what to do with a number that small. His mother taught him. She was illiterate but brilliant at math, and during the first Taliban era, when sanctions choked their village in Qarabagh, a rural district north of Kabul, she taught her ten-year-old son how to make 2,000 Afghani last two months.