The 15-year-old boy was standing outside the police station, late one night during the immigration wave of 2015. I was meeting youths like him almost every day, as they came to the station to apply for asylum. Sweden was the country in Europe that took in most immigrants per capita during the crisis, with numbers up to over 160,000 by the end of the year. 35,000 of them, mostly Afghans, claimed refugee status as unaccompanied minors. Linköping is a small town and I was the only police officer there who spoke their language, Dari.

As we sat down to go through routine questioning, I started thinking about my own memories of coming to Sweden from Afghanistan with my parents and siblings. I was a few years younger than the boy sitting across the table from me.

I wanted to tell him that he had come to an amazing country. I wanted to tell him that he had all the opportunity in the world to build a better future for himself. That he no longer had to be afraid. But I didn’t have time to say any of those things before the boy broke down before me. He couldn’t stop crying.

He told me that he had lost his mother and big brother among hundreds of other migrants in the Turkish mountains. Suddenly on his own, he had managed to travel through Germany and Denmark before finally reaching Sweden. He had just gotten off the train.

He asked me through his tears if he would ever see his mother again.

I realized that this kid wasn’t thinking about his education, or his future. He just wanted his Mom.

I have quit my job as a policeman since then, and I now work full-time meeting, talking and giving lectures to unaccompanied Afghans in Sweden. I want to do my part to help them integrate into their new home country—a process that is often anything but easy.

To me, coming to Sweden from Taliban-run Afghanistan in 1997 was like winning the lottery. Sweden may well have saved my life. And at the same time, there were so many things about my new country that I found puzzling and even shocking.

Why would the Swedish state sell alcohol to the public? How could boys and girls date, without bringing shame on their families? And why the hell would anyone drink milk with their food?

Another thing I couldn’t begin to understand was how two men could marry each other under Swedish law. The way I saw it, that was just morally wrong.

Many of the Afghan youths I meet today are just as puzzled—which should come as no surprise. The World Value Survey maps social, cultural, moral, religious norms in different parts of the world. Year after year, our little country far to the north ends up at the upper right-hand corner of that map. Only Japan is more secular than Sweden. But no other country is as individualistic as ours. In that sense, Sweden might be the most extreme country in the world.

But it is also striking that most of the migrants that Sweden has received in recent years come from the far-left corner of the map. In terms of culture, Afghanistan is the opposite of Sweden. And this has brought problems that Swedish authorities first failed to foresee, and then for a long time failed to acknowledge even when they had become all-too-obvious to the public.