Making it to the United States is only the beginning, refugees soon learn.
The key for many to what comes next is perhaps surprisingly simple, even pedestrian, but it’s also everything: a driver’s license.
With one, their new country unlocks. A job is easier to land. The road to self-sufficiency smooths. An American life becomes that much more attainable.
Crystal Bayat couldn’t have known any of this four days after the Taliban arrived in her hometown, Kabul, on Aug. 15, 2021, when she protested in the streets on Afghanistan’s 102nd Independence Day. Though it turned out to be a first step toward Utah.
Seeing a news photograph of a partially obscured Taliban fighter pointing his assault rifle at Bayat that day as she was looking another direction, the wonder might be that she is alive today, never mind exploring ways a handful of years later to help fellow refugees in her adapted community in the Salt Lake Valley.
It’s not hard to imagine the finger on the trigger in the menacing way the weapon is pointed at her, the slightest twitch imminent, her having discarded any pretense of a burqa, fierce and angry and scared to death among 200 others but only six other women at a demonstration she helped organize. The wonder at the trigger finger somehow not twitching in that moment.
This woman in the most oppressive patriarchy in the world, her voice shaking but determined in a video posted on The New York Times website as she declares she’s willing to be killed protesting the latest indignity.
“Today, unfortunately, all my dreams died,” she says in the clip.
She endured to escape Afghanistan nearly a year later and work on behalf of her homeland from afar despite death threats, at least one attempt with a bomb in her car, and the finger on the trigger that day on the street, perhaps her closest call.
Now she’s setting up a pilot program for refugee women to negotiate the high quest … for a driver’s license?
Yes, absolutely. She said she knows this is the path toward truer freedom. A license, a car to drive, a job, independence in a way public transit can’t provide, especially for newcomers who don’t speak the language or understand this strange new world they have landed in, especially for the women.
“As a refugee woman, I personally experienced, and then the girls that I brought through (from Afghanistan). … Each of us experienced how important these basic programs are,” Bayat said. “I mean, it sounds very basic, but these basic things always create big challenges for these new residents. So we saw that mobility was a critical challenge for these women.”
Lee Rech, Bayat’s mentor and executive director of her small foundation, Hope for Her International, was part of the team associated with then-state Attorney General Sean Reyes that extracted Bayat from Afghanistan after a member noted the news coverage of her.
Bayat spent six weeks in a military compound in Wisconsin while her papers were processed and her background more fully vetted. Then it was on to Utah.
She stayed for a weekend at St. Regis in Deer Valley before moving to Salt Lake City for a couple of years. She spent the summer of 2024 at a home in Old Town until moving that fall to Pittsburgh, where she is finishing her master’s in public policy and management at Carnegie Mellon University on a Fulbright scholarship.
She said some of the strangeness of her new life eased with the Park City area’s resemblance to home.
“In terms of how it looks like my country or where I was, it’s definitely so similar. And the culture, the people, are so family oriented. They’re so supportive, very loving,” she said. It all reminded her of home, and she said she felt less like a refugee.
Bayat escaped and then helped others escape Afghanistan as she dialed in her foundation that among other efforts helps educate girls online in the country banned from school by the Taliban. According to the website, the group has aided in the escape of 100 individuals from the country to Canada, the United States and Europe.
The pilot Drive to Thrive, launched in May to help refugee women here through the driver’s license gantlet, sounds as important as the rest to Bayat.
It obviously is to Mary Maker, who fled South Sudan as a child with surviving family to Kenya after her father was killed, and came to the United States after her husband and uncle were killed in South Sudan. This much comes through her limited English spoken in a thick Dinka brogue.
She has settled in Salt Lake City with family members including two teenage daughters, a young adult son and grandchildren.
With a driver’s license and a car, “My life,” she said with a big smile, “my life will be easy.”
She is one of four women in the pilot program taught by Nilofar Noorzai, an Afghan refugee herself. Noorzai meets with three Afghan women online for an hour weekday mornings, and Maker for an hour in the evening before Maker heads out for her night job. On Fridays they meet for two hours for review, and quizzes come on Mondays. The foundation picks up all the costs.
Maker’s workday begins at 7 a.m. to care for senior citizens, getting home after 5:30 p.m. Then she’s off again around 7 p.m. for overnight shifts cleaning the expansive floors of Salt Lake City International Airport. She must arrange rides or the bus to get around. Public transit remains much slower, limiting and a hassle, especially with children.
She looks forward to driving her daughters to school, to appointments, on errands, to the freedom a license and a car bring in Utah generally and the Salt Lake Valley in particular.
Heaven on Earth for her sounds a lot like driving on a Saturday — anywhere she wants.
This will begin to happen after she passes her written driving exam. That’s the plan for August. Next is learning to drive through the Salt Lake International Driving School, which offers instruction tailored to recent refugees.
Noorzai recently arrived via Qatar, where she had won a scholarship to study. She was the only woman allowed out of Afghanistan from a group of 69 that tried to leave. Her brother happened to be with her and could serve as guardian under the new Taliban rule. The rest of the women were turned away.
“I came from an educated family, and I studied in one of the American University branches in my country,” Noorzai said. “I used to live in their dormitory, so the day when my country was taken over by the people right now, I had to hide my identity because they thought, like, people who stayed there are all converted, they are atheists, or they have a different religion.”
Today, her day job is with the state Department of Workforce Services helping people with disabilities find work. Teaching the pilot program is a passion project for her. She has family in Afghanistan living under reasserted Taliban rule.
“I still have my sister who can’t go to school,” she said. “So I’m struggling every day to find an online school for her. Now, this online driving school, driving is a basic human right. Education is a basic human right that not most of the people can get.”
She said she connects with Maker and the others from shared experience living in war zones and with personal freedoms taken away, as well as the pain of separation from loved ones.
“I can speak English, I can study, I can teach people, I can make it easier,” she said. “I can summarize for them to study, get their lives, and make their life easier. If I make Mary’s life easier today, it’s not only her life. It’s her children’s lives, as well.”
She continued, “So today I help Mary. Tomorrow she helps somebody else. … This chain needs to grow. That’s why I’m here, and I dedicate my time for them.”
Noorzai speaks several languages. Dari, Hindi, Urdu, Pashto, and English.
“I learned it from TV when I was just like 7,” she said. “I used to watch. There was a Cartoon Network channel that would play cartoons 24/7, and I was in love with it. I learned English from the TV.”
An estimated 900-1,300 people from Afghanistan live in Utah, primarily the Salt Lake City area. Enough of them, along with 2,000 people from neighboring Pakistan and up to 1,250 Iranians, for a handful of family run restaurants to open in the valley, serving meals from the region.
Rech’s family originally came to America from Armenia in 1906 under similar circumstances, no doubt fueling the longtime public relations professional’s commitment to Bayat’s cause, as well as others like her. She said the Armenian community, numbering around 1,500 in the Salt Lake City area, also looks at the mountains and Wasatch Back as a comforting hint of their homeland.
Meantime, Bayat’s extended family situation is common among her country’s diaspora. She has a grandmother who took refuge in Iran, and other relatives in Pakistan. Both countries, like the United States, today are uncertain hosts seeking to send refugees back to Taliban-run Afghanistan and to possible punishment for suspected ties to America.
Bayat’s paperwork is secure, as confirmed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while she notes the difficulties and uncertainty running through the refugee community. As support for refugees becomes more tenuous, she and others see more need for their help.
“It’s not just about helping the community, but down the road it actually contributes to the country’s economy,” she said. “I know the dollar amounts that we are investing in these women are not as big as, like, they receive only so much from the government, and our goal is to help make them independent financially, have a job. So that’s what makes our program unique, because we do not only help them with a driving license, but then also using our local resources to donate them a car because it’s just so difficult. They don’t have a credit background, so they can’t even go for a loan and get credit.”
In other words, a simple driver’s license for these women and their children is not so much a license as a ticket. A license, a car, maybe eventually a chance to establish credit, that toehold on the American Dream.
“Mary is really busy,” Noorzai said. “She has a job from morning till 5:40, something like that, and she gets home, and then she leaves at 7 again. She works overnight at the airport.”
And she plans to go to school as well. Learning to get her driver’s license is only a first step toward that goal.
“I know she’s going to make it,” Noorzai said. “She’s working day and night, but still she dedicates her time to learn, and that’s what I really appreciate about her. She’s really strong.”
For more information about Drive to Thrive and/or how to support the program, email [email protected]. Also: hopeforherinternational.org/#DRIVE-TO-THRIVE.