Afghanistan's Female Taxi Driver

Afghanistan's Female Taxi Driver

      Imagine not being able to do what you want because of your appearance, representation, etc. For some people, they have already experienced such discrimination and felt many different emotions about it. For others, it still continues and for the rest, their time has yet to come. But being discriminated against is not right. Meet Sarah Bahai, the only female taxi driver in Afghanistan who is bullied by her male peers in her country.

      Bahai has spent most of her life defying taboos or traditions in her home country of Afghanistan, where women don't have many of the same rights that men have. The first time Bahai touched the wheel was shortly after the Taliban attacks. "I felt like I was in the sky, and I totally fell in life with driving." She drives in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, in a clean yellow and white Toyota Corolla.

      By being a taxi drivers, Bahai, 40, struggles to put food on the table for her parents and siblings. She is not married and fears that a husband will stop her from doing what she loves. When Taliban insurgents shot and killed Bahai's brother-in-law, she took in her sister and 7 nieces and nephews, making that a dozen people Bahai supports.

      Everyday, Bahai is bullied by the male crowd in Afghanistan. She receives death threats from unknown callers, telling Bahai that a woman driving is against Islam and they will kill her is Bahai continues to be a taxi driver. "Male passengers are very jealous and often abuse me, but I don't care what they think of me, I am not afraid. I will change the country with whatever ability I have to do so."

      Attitudes about women have slowly changed since the fall of the Taliban, but local authorities and people with deep, conservative traditions don't change. Women outside without a male relative face verbal and sometimes physicla harassment. Domestic violence goes without punishment and young girls are still married off against their will to older men.

     Afghanistan' First Lady Rula Ghani said in a speech on International Women's Day on Sunday March 8, "Women should be respected both inside and outside their homes and play an active role in society as doctors, engineers, soldiers and police officers." She also added how she didn't want a worldly view of Afghan woman to be as victims. Ghani is the first wife of an Afghan leader to routinely appear in public and has campaigned for women's issues and poverty alleviation.

      Since she got her license in 2007, Bahai has become a mechanic. She is teaching other women how to drive, thanks of her university degree in education. Bahai sees more and more women graduating college and living their own lives, as she has done. "They are building the confidence to live independently. Step by step, everything is going to be all right," she says. "My message for Afghan women is to stand up for yourselves, set goals and achieve them, and to help make Afghanistan a happy place to live."

Sources found from yahoo.com and bbc.com