“Your life doesn’t start in the U.S. until you have reliable transportation”
Driving lessons are hard to come by. These nonprofits are working to give immigrants and refugees mobility in car-dependent metro Atlanta.
This story is part of The Cost of Living Project - an investigative reporting and community storytelling project that examines the price we pay to live in Atlanta, launched by Canopy Atlanta and the Atlanta Civic Circle, with support from The Partnership for Southern Equity.
The Cost of Living Project (CoL) is launching a new series on cars, driving, and transportation infrastructure: How do we get around in Atlanta? What does it cost us in terms of time and money? What would ease that burden? In the first story of the series, CoL explores a hurdle faced by people who migrate to the metro area from outside the U.S.: getting a driver’s license. Stay tuned for more and if you have an idea of a story you think should be covered, get in touch here.
It's bright and early on a Saturday morning in November but Abubakar Adam, a driving instructor originally from Sudan, has already been awake for hours. He is sitting in the passenger’s seat of a white Toyota Corolla next to Randah, a mother of six who moved to Clarkston from Syria earlier this year.
She is driving for the first time in her life.
As Randah steers them through the quiet neighborhood streets of Stone Mountain, Adam gives simple directions in soft-spoken Arabic, his feet ready to press the brakes if needed. Randah’s teenage son sits in the back seat playing soccer video games on his mom’s phone. Her five other kids are home with her husband, who has a day off from his job at an Amazon warehouse. Randah’s husband wanted to teach her to drive himself, but since the family car lacks the passenger-side brake pedal that instructional vehicles have, he didn’t feel it was quite safe.
Many of Adam’s students are similar to Randah: first-time women drivers who’ve recently arrived in the U.S., and who are dependent on their husbands’ work schedules to find the time for lessons. The Stone Mountain–based company that Adam cofounded with Babikir Moussa in 2012, Gore Driving School, helps offer a solution to the predicament. While providing regular lessons for a cost to anyone who wants them, Gore also contracts with the nonprofit Ethaar, which supports refugees and other underserved members of Georgia’s Muslim communities, to give driving lessons to women: Ethaar pays a discounted rate, and the women get the lessons for free.
Though some other service organizations help connect refugee and immigrant clients to driving instruction on an ad hoc basis, Ethaar’s Women Behind the Wheel is a one-of-a-kind program in Atlanta—and it’s in high demand. In 2023 alone, 14 women have gotten driver’s licenses after completing lessons with the program, and 14 more are currently taking classes. Just behind them, 26 people have their names on a waiting list, where they could expect to spend up to three or four months.
“There’s always a wait list,” said Ethaar’s executive director, Sarah Karim. The program doesn’t have enough funding to pay for more instructors, and even if it did, finding the right teachers can be a challenge—the pool of instructors who are bilingual and culturally sensitive is small. Finding women instructors, which many women students prefer, is even harder. “We try to prioritize clients in dire need, like pregnant women having twins, women who have children with disabilities, or women who are the sole providers for their families,” Karim said.
“We try to prioritize clients in dire need, like pregnant women having twins, women who have children with disabilities, or women who are the sole providers for their families.”
Meanwhile, there’s a clear need in the community. “Your life doesn’t start in the U.S. until you have reliable transportation,” said Shaista Amani, program manager at the Afghan American Alliance of Georgia, which supports newly arriving Afghan families in the Atlanta area. Many of the families Amani works with live in Clarkston, Stone Mountain, or Tucker—where walking to the grocery store or a doctor’s appointment is almost unthinkable, especially for people with small children in tow, given the major highways and lack of sidewalks. That’s why Amani has been trying to get a driving program up and running. In most of the families she works with, the husbands are the sole breadwinners. “Women are just stuck,” she said. “They don’t have childcare, they don’t have enough money to pay for driving lessons, and there are no jobs to work from home if you don’t speak English.”
“Women are just stuck. They don’t have childcare, they don’t have enough money to pay for driving lessons, and there are no jobs to work from home if you don’t speak English.”
As Randah drives down tree-lined streets less than a mile away from bustling Memorial Drive, she expresses a similar sentiment. “Everything is expensive,” she says in Arabic, with Adam translating. Gore Driving School’s typical rate is $130 for a two-hour lesson and $240 for four hours—costs comparable to those at other metro-area driving schools. Because learning to drive competently enough to pass the road test can take well beyond four hours, a full course of lessons can run to more than $600. For new arrivals often securing their first jobs at poultry plants or warehouses, paying that kind of money just isn’t possible.
Amani recently found some funding to provide driving lessons for members of the Afghan community, but with the high cost it’ll stretch only so far. She’s been calling around, so far unsuccessfully, trying to find driving schools that might offer the nonprofit a heavy discount, and is also hoping to raise money to support more lessons.
Adam’s driving school offers Ethaar a discount because, he said, he knows what it’s like to feel stranded in Atlanta. Most people didn’t drive in Sudan, which Adam left in 2008, he said: “Most people are the same as me, coming here. When I started learning to drive, it was a struggle to find someone to teach me.” He eventually found an instructor all the way out in Gwinnett County.
The experience inspired him to open a driving school. “I wanted to help my community,” he said.
As the two-hour lesson comes to an end, Adam navigates Randah back to her apartment in Clarkston. But it takes longer than expected. They hit a traffic jam outside Thriftown grocery store, where a free food drive has dozens of cars lined up down Indian Creek Road. After the delay, Randah drives back home. Adam gets into the driver seat and makes his way to another apartment complex to pick up his next student.
I deeply appreciate this reporting, always so centered on the lived experiences of folks who confront challenges US-born folks might not even realize. When I think of supporting MARTA and transit, I often think of the personal benefit to me, but this makes it plain how exceptionally important it would be for others.