Palestine’s Only Female Taxi Driver Has Big Dreams

Nadia Ahmad prefers to drive in manual. She laughs, motioning with one hand as if she is changing gears while the other one rests on an imaginary wheel.
 Ahmad has been preoccupied with cars since she was a young girl, but she never thought she would end up making a living out of her love for being behind the wheel.

For the past two years, Ahmad has been driving a taxi through the streets of Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.
While she never planned to make a political statement with her career, there is no getting around it: Ahmad is believed to be the only female taxi driver in all of Palestine.  Her floral-printed mauve headscarf and long black abaya stand out among the rows of bare male elbows poking out of the drivers’ windows in the bustling city of Hebron.
She says that her husband, a professor of information technology at a local university, never challenged her dream of driving a taxi – but many others in the community were not as open to her unusual job choice.
“In the beginning, there was a lot of gossip. When my brother heard other drivers talking about me, about ‘that woman who drives a taxi’, he came home and was furious and demanded I stop at once,” Ahmad told Al Jazeera.