Afghan Fulbright semi-finalists anxiously await State Dept. update on program

Afghanistan semi-finalists for the State Department's prestigious Fulbright Program, including Maryam Jami, 23, await an update on the fate of their cohort on Dec. 15.

Maryam Jami, 23, an attorney in Herat, Afghanistan, who calls herself a "mini-human rights activist," still dreams of obtaining her Masters of Law in the United States as a Fulbright scholar next year, pinning the program as both a venue to her own dreams and a tool for a better future for Afghanistan.

But she and roughly 100 other semi-finalists in the country now taken over by the Taliban have been left in limbo since the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops and unofficial pause of the prestigious program run by the U.S. State Department.

"For me, the Fulbright was just my dream -- and my actual path to my dreams," Jami told ABC News in a video call from her home in Herat. "Sometimes I feel that I'm going to be depressed because it's really -- it's just getting really too tough for me... I just feel that I'm running out of time."

Jami planned on studying comparative and international law and taking that training after one year back to Afghanistan to help aid women and refugees. Instead, she's confined to her small home in Herat with her mother, father, and three younger sisters, unable to go out for coffee or tea, her family fearful of fighters in the street, and confined to watching movies inside while she frantically applies to other scholarships after having turned down multiple offers to evacuate in August, she says, holding out hope for the Fulbright Program.