Program o ers wheel help
• In a large, empty parking lot outside Atlanta, one car 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 one of the first times in her life.
“Turn the wheel and then accelerate,” Gobran, the owner of Safety Driving School, said softly in Arabic. Gripping the wheel tightly, the student cautiously rounded the corners of the parking lot 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. Many of the women who enrol come from countries that discourage women from driving or working outside their home.
It’s not a new concept, but Women Behind the Wheel is unique to Georgia.
“Helping a lot of refugees is not easy,” Gobran said. “At the beginning, it’s kind of awkward for some people for their first time being behind the wheel, but by the end of the program, they gained the benefit they’ve been looking for.”
Students sign up for the driving program through Ethaar, an Atlanta-area non-profit 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 started 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 really wanted to empower our female clients. A lot of these women were struggling because they were fully dependent 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 can’t really provide if you’re making minimum
wage and you have six mouths to feed in addition to helping with your wife,” Megahed said. “So she also needs to kind of learn how to drive and find a job and
get out there.”
Their clientele depends on the shifting global landscape and conflicts, says Sarah Karim, Ethaar’s executive director. “Lately, we’ve observed various nationalities among our clients, including families and individuals from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq and Eritrea,” Karim said.
So far, there have been 230 graduates of the program, including a few men. The driving program typically has a three-to-fourmonth wait-list because of the demand. “The point is for every refugee to reach self-sufficiency or self-reliance,” said Dorian Crosby, a Spelman College professor who is an expert in refugee migration.
“Learning how to drive and getting access to a licence is critical to refugee women reaching that level of self-reliance,” Crosby said. “It’s not just to meet the government regulations of the cutoff, but they now can sustain themselves. It is also such an emotional boost.”