Masouma Tajik, 23, dreams of buying her own place. One year ago, having graduated from the American University of Afghanistan, she was working as a data analyst in Kabul, writes @naina.bajekal. She would return each evening to the rented apartment she had decorated with fairy lights and candles, cook a meal and watch a movie. She felt at home. Tajik has since spent months in limbo. “I lived in places that no human being should live,” she says. Last August, after days spent in the Kabul airport—where she was whipped by the Taliban—she was finally able to board a plane for Kyiv. As the breadwinner for her family—her degree and fluency in English have opened doors that remain closed to her parents—Tajik sent money back to Afghanistan every month. “I left nearly everything in Kabul, I just had a backpack with my laptop and a novel by Elif Shafak, ‘The Forty Rules of Love.’ That was almost like a Koran for me, but I gifted it to a Ukrainian friend,” she says. In mid-February, worried about an impending Russian invasion, Tajik packed her backpack once more and fled to the Western city of Lviv. Her journey took her to Warsaw, to a refugee camp in the Netherlands, and ultimately to the U.S.—after being accepted with a full scholarship into a two-year master’s program in data science at Rutgers University. And though she doesn’t know what will happen after two years, she knows she won’t let these opportunities come to nothing. “What we need is not pity and empathy,” she says. “What we need is opportunities so we can make our own way.” Read more about the Afghan women who are attempting to build new lives abroad at the link in our bio. Photographs by Diana Markosian (@markosian) for TIME