STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. — In a big, empty car parking zone outside Atlanta, one automotive slowly careened around parking spaces. From the passenger seat, driving instructor Nancy Gobran peered over large sunglasses at her student, a 30-year-old Syrian refugee woman who was driving for considered one of the primary times in her life.
“Turn the wheel after which speed up,” Gobran, the owner of Safety Driving School, said softly in Arabic. Gripping the wheel tightly, the coed cautiously rounded the corners of the car parking zone for nearly an hour.
Gobran has been working for nearly five years with a program called Women Behind the Wheel, which offers 14 hours of free drivers’ education to mostly refugee and immigrant women. Most of the women who enroll come from countries that discourage women from driving or working outside their home.
It isn’t a brand new concept, but Women Behind the Wheel is exclusive to Georgia. Similar programs exist across the country, equivalent to Refugee Women Rising in Omaha, Nebraska, which offers driver’s education, seat belt safety and automotive seat installation help, and Driving Opportunity in Denver, which offers classroom and road instruction to refugee women.
“Helping plenty of refugees just isn’t easy,” Gobran said. “Firstly, it’s type of awkward for some people for his or her first time being behind the wheel, but by the top of this system, they gained the profit they’ve been on the lookout for.”
Students join for the driving program through Ethaar, an Atlanta-area nonprofit organization that aids refugee families through their resettlement. Its name is an Arabic word meaning altruism and affection.
Ethaar co-founder Mona Megahed said she began Women Behind the Wheel to fill a glaring need many refugee families have that partially stem from cultural differences.
“We named it Women Behind the Wheel for a reason,” Megahed said. “We actually desired to empower our female clients. A number of these women were struggling because they were fully depending on their spouses.”
She noted some husbands held beliefs from their home countries that their wives shouldn’t drive or work.
“We quickly explained, well, you possibly can’t really provide should you’re making minimum wage and you could have six mouths to feed along with helping along with your wife,” Megahed said. “So she also must type of learn the way to drive and discover a job and get on the market.”
The stress may be compounded for families in metro Atlanta, where many individuals depend on cars to get around. A lot of the refugee families Ethaar works with settle in Clarkston, a suburb 15 miles (24 kilometers) northeast of Atlanta.
“More often than not due to lack of access to transportation, it’s hard for them to get to their jobs,” said Sarah Karim, Ethaar’s executive director. “It’s hard for them to go study anywhere apart from what’s close by, and there aren’t that many options, unfortunately.”
Their clientele is determined by the shifting global landscape and conflicts, Karim said.
“Currently, we’ve observed various nationalities amongst our clients, including families and individuals from Afghanistan, Burma, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq and Eritrea,” Karim said.
To this point, there have been 230 graduates of this system, including just a few men. The driving program typically has a three-to-four-month waitlist due to demand. The U.S. government gives refugee families as much as 12 months of monetary and medical assistance, so there is restricted time to grow to be autonomous.
“The purpose is for each refugee to achieve self-sufficiency or self-reliance,” said Dorian Crosby, a Spelman College professor who’s an authority in refugee migration.
“Learning the way to drive and gaining access to a license is critical to refugee women reaching that level of self-reliance,” Crosby said. “It’s not only to fulfill the federal government regulations of the cutoff, but they now can sustain themselves. It is usually such an emotional boost.”
Instructors like Gobran are fluent in Arabic, which makes students more comfortable. She watched her client slowly gain confidence over her hourlong session. A smile crept across her face. A month later, her student passed her driving test.
“That is their recent home, they usually have to grasp how this country works,” Gobran said. “It starts with the little or no thing as driving to construct a future.”
This Article First Appeared At www.autoblog.com
