Samira Rustami was 16 when she won a scholarship to business school in India. Three years later she went home to Afghanistan, took a hotel job, and had been there only seven months when the U.S. occupation ended in August 2021. Today, at 24, she is studying nursing at Chatham University in Shadyside and training at UPMC Shadyside School of Nursing, a path she never could have predicted when the Taliban swept back into power.
Rustami's road to Pittsburgh ran through chaos. Her husband, Waisuddin Rustami, worked as a maintenance man for the New York Times for three months before the newspaper helped evacuate more than 120 Afghans working in its Kabul bureau, according to TribLIVE. One of those Afghans, reporter Najim Rahim, told his family they had just 30 minutes to pack and leave the country, TribLIVE reports. Accounts of the scale of that evacuation vary: PBS NewsHour reports the Times ultimately evacuated 124 Afghan employees and family members, while WBUR describes a mission that evacuated more than 200 Afghans after Kabul fell.
Samira and Wais Rustami landed in Pittsburgh in January 2023 with their infant daughter, Durrin, who was 4 years old by the time of publication, per TribLIVE. Rustami became pregnant within a month of resettling in the United States, and she has said she sometimes brought her baby to class. She has also said her own mother opposed women's education and burned books to prevent her from attending school — a history that makes her present course load at Chatham feel hard-won. Rustami has said she wanted a better life and believed she could do more, and she sees a future nursing career as a way to give back to her community.
A Tailored Path Through Chatham's English Program
Marwa Rahim's interruption came differently but no less abruptly. She was 27 and only months away from graduating medical school in Afghanistan in 2021 when she had to flee, according to WTAE. Rebuilding meant starting her undergraduate degree over from scratch. Chatham tailored a curriculum for her that began with intensive English-language classes, the station reports, and she has said she wanted to pursue education once she regained the right to do so.
Chatham's intensive English-language program became the eventual landing spot for five Afghan refugees connected to the Times evacuation, including Rustami, her husband and Marwa, according to wesanews.org. Rustami and Rahim were initially located in Texas before enrolling at Chatham in Shadyside, per TribLIVE. Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian connected author Rebecca Blumenstein with Chatham's immersive English-language program in 2022, TribLIVE reports, a link that helped route the women toward the Pittsburgh university's history as a former women's college. Rahim has said Chatham accepted the women's visa and financial situations as they arrived.
Rebuilding Degrees From Scratch
At Chatham, Rustami received a partially funded scholarship to pursue another bachelor's degree, according to the university's Global Engagement office. Waisuddin Rustami, her husband, is studying data analytics, per TribLIVE. Rahim, meanwhile, studies human biology, serves as a freshman orientation leader, sits on the science department's diversity, equality and inclusion committee, and leads the university's Motivation Club, according to TribLIVE. She interned at the UPMC Vision Institute this year and has observed open-heart surgery alongside classmates, the outlet reports.
Rahim's parents, Mohammad Rahim Rahim and Gulalai Rahim, were both educators in Afghanistan and now live in Woodbridge, Virginia, according to TribLIVE. Other Afghan students who passed through Chatham's English Language Program took similarly winding routes. Mursal and Marwa Rahim traveled from Afghanistan through Doha, Qatar, and Mexico City before finally reaching Houston, according to Chatham's Pulse blog. Chatham identified Mursal, Marwa and a third student, Omar Ahmadi, as needing additional English support after they had already completed first degrees in Afghanistan, the blog notes. Mursal studied English full-time before moving into academic coursework in business and intercultural communications, and she has said she wants to work in law or with an organization focused on refugees, women's rights or children's rights. She has since graduated with a master's of public administration from Cornell University's Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, according to WBUR.
A New Book Tells Their Stories
Rustami and Rahim's journeys are now featured in “The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape From Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America,” written by Rebecca Blumenstein and Diana Kapp, per TribLIVE. Blumenstein is president of NBC News, and Kapp is a journalist with extensive experience in Afghanistan who has visited Chatham at least 20 times over the years and visited a school in Takhar province in 2012, TribLIVE reports. The book follows four young women building new lives in America, according to WBUR, and also profiles Mursal and Maryam Alokozay, per TribLIVE. Blumenstein and Kapp are scheduled to visit Chatham University for an event at the Laughlin Music Center, according to TribLIVE.
The Education Ban They Left Behind
The stakes behind these stories are stark. Since Dec. 20, 2022, women have been banned from attending universities in Afghanistan, shutting out more than 100,000 young women from higher education, according to UNESCO. Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where secondary and higher education is forbidden to girls and women, UNESCO says, and nearly 2.2 million Afghan girls and women are now barred from schooling beyond the primary level. Roughly 5.3 million Afghan refugees and asylum seekers are registered in neighboring countries, mostly Iran and Pakistan, per UNESCO.
Researchers interviewed by Nature say girls over age 12 and women in Afghanistan are unlikely to be allowed back into schools and universities for the foreseeable future. Some outside scholarship pathways have also wavered: a USAID-funded program supporting 208 Afghan women, including 120 who relocated to Oman and Qatar for in-person study, was terminated in April 2025 before being reinstated through June, according to NPR, which reported the program's future remained uncertain. That endowment traces back to a 2018 USAID grant of $50 million to the Texas A&M University Foundation, NPR notes, and now focuses on STEM fields of study.
Against that backdrop, Rustami and Rahim's presence in Chatham classrooms in Shadyside stands out as a rare continuation of paths the Taliban tried to close off entirely. For Rustami, that means balancing nursing coursework with motherhood; for Rahim, it means rebuilding a medical education that was nearly complete before she had to leave it behind.
