Sister’s law degree ‘doesn’t exist’ after Taliban takeover
Marwa Rahim’s first weeks in Houston were a blur, according to an adapted excerpt from the forthcoming book “The Last Free Women” that The Wall Street Journal published Sept. 6. She arrived with her family at the Extended Stay America hotel after midnight, almost 24 hours after starting the day in Mexico City, and slept much of the day in those early weeks. “It just felt all, like, fake,” she said. “How was it possible that in one month, our life completely changed? We didn’t know if we should cry or we should be happy.”
The excerpt is adapted from “The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America” by Rebecca Blumenstein and Diana Kapp, to be published Sept. 8 by Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. The book chronicles the coming-of-age stories of four women The New York Times evacuated after the collapse of Kabul five years ago, when news organizations, nonprofits and veterans scrambled to evacuate the Afghans who had helped them over the course of America’s longest war. According to the excerpt, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other organizations worked closely together to evacuate hundreds of local staff and their families and help them resettle.
For Rahim, 21, the momentary burst of relief at having gotten out of Kabul in 2021 gave way to something darker and foggier. Had things not collapsed in Afghanistan, she would have been four semesters from completing medical school and beginning her practical rotations at a hospital. She feared the closest she was to her lifelong dream of becoming a cardiologist was a hotel room three-quarters of a mile from the Texas Medical Center.
Three or four hours could slip by in a trancelike state as she scrolled social media, following every Taliban edict and distress posting from afar. On WhatsApp, she texted friends — especially her best friend in Afghanistan, Karishma — some iteration of the same sentiment: “It will be OK. Taliban will go. We will be free again.” At the time, she believed that. After several weeks of this doomscrolling, she deleted all of her social media apps; in the years that followed, she would occasionally redownload them, then delete them again when despair overwhelmed her.
Mealtimes were the most depressing part of the day, the excerpt says. The Rahims had always been a spirited bunch when eating together, constantly interrupting each other in a friendly competition for airtime. Now the nine of them sat on the floor in one of their two rooms — one for men and one for women — foil pans of halal food laid on towels, in eerie silence.
The emotional strain spread beyond the family. One evacuated mother went to the emergency room with shortness of breath and high blood pressure, fearing she might be having a heart attack; her tests came back normal, and a clinician diagnosed panic attacks and prescribed Zoloft. Several new mothers battled what looked like postpartum depression, and the excerpt says many of the newly arrived Afghans seemed to face some level of PTSD.
Rahim worried about her sister Sosan, a 31-year-old newlywed and former math teacher who had proudly instructed girls from rural areas. Sosan’s husband was thousands of miles away in Turkey, with no sense of when she might see him. Another sister, Mursal, 24, a recent law school graduate, had received her first request to interview for a legal assistant job on the very day Kabul fell. Now she grieved the Taliban’s obliteration of the Afghan legal system and her degree, which was effectively useless. “All the law I studied doesn’t exist,” Mursal said. “There is no anything.”
Rahim’s constant stress caused her skin to break out as she relived scenes from the escape: a mother covering her baby’s ears each time shots rang out, militants clubbing her little brother with their rifle butts, and a moment at the airport when the Taliban descended and she was certain her family would be killed on the spot. “I want to forget it, but I can’t,” she said. “I don’t even write about it in a journal.” Her older sisters were taking sleeping pills. The family attended group sessions that Catholic Charities called “culture bumps,” covering topics from ATM use to 911 calls to funeral costs in America.
Early on, the family’s only outings were for their endless appointments: intake with resettlement caseworkers, immunizations and TB tests, signups for Social Security numbers and SNAP. Marwa, her mother and her sisters eventually ventured further afield, taking trips to Walmart and Target. Their hotel sat within a web of highways, so they walked along busy roads as cars sped by at 70-plus mph. They had never encountered a crossing signal before and were confused when they did, and in those days they carried their IDs whenever they went out, fearful of being stopped by police. “Mursal and I acted like we were illegal, always with our passports in our pockets, even just to go to the driveway of the hotel,” she said.
The superstore aisles held strange items and shocking prices. The family sought out rice, potatoes, milk and onions; they could have bought 30 loaves of bread back home for the cost of one here. The packaged quantities, ironically, did not seem large enough to feed a family of nine accustomed to buying chest-high sacks of rice and crates of vegetables, which they stored in the basement to have food on hand in case a security situation shut the stores for days.
In the frantic exit, Rahim left behind most of her school transcripts and certificates. The credits likely would not have transferred anyway — the differences in the two education systems were vast. The younger students in the Times cohort had it easier, able to enroll directly in public elementary and secondary schools. High school graduates were the tougher category: they had been told they would likely need to pass the GED exam to apply to college, and that would be difficult — and even if they did, how would they pay for it? Marwa and her siblings had to be the primary breadwinners to help the family survive.
“Do I even have a future?” she agonized on loop. She tried to convince herself that this was not the worst thing; the excerpt describes her as rueful but resigned. “Will I have to be a shopkeeper?” she thought, her dreams of becoming a doctor fading away.