When Mohammad Ali and Zakia related how her family opposed the match because they are Sunni Tajiks and he is a Shiite Hazara, and how the two had tried for years to persuade her parents to allow them to be together, Zahra and Haji readily agreed the couple could stay.

“I support what they did; they love each other,” Zahra said. “And for God’s sake, I decided we should help them.”

This was the eighth place the couple had slept in since the night that Zakia fled a women’s shelter in Bamian, where she had spent months in custody under court order. At one point, they tried to flee across the Iranian border, but the people smugglers there wanted more money than they had, and the walk was, Mohammad Ali feared, more than Zakia could survive.

For a while, they took refuge in Ghazni Province, a dangerous area with a large Hazara population.

Finally they came to these high mountains, where they could at least find friends and distant relatives, although not all were welcoming. One night, turned away from shelter, the couple had to sleep on a mountainside; two nights, though they were near a large town, they feared to enter it and slept in a cave on the outskirts.

By the time they arrived at Haji and Zahra’s home, Mohammad Ali said, he was down to his last 1,000 afghanis — less than $20. There was no cellphone service unless he climbed to the top of a 14,000-foot peak nearby, and often that still did not work. He needed to make calls to arrange their next refuge.