KABUL, Afghanistan >> Hamstrung by student loans and dismayed at her meager prospects for repaying them, Kimberley Chongyon Motley left the long hours and low pay of the Milwaukee public defender’s office in 2008 for the long-shot promise of Afghanistan.

“I came here for the money, just like half the people here,” she says in “Motley’s Law,” a documentary about her unusual legal career that was broadcast on Al-Jazeera America in February. Before arriving here, “I couldn’t find Afghanistan on the map.”

Motley, 40, a Marquette University Law School graduate, had never before traveled overseas when she enrolled in a Justice Department program to train Afghan lawyers and flew to one of the world’s more dangerous places.

After her nine-month assignment, she did not return home to Milwaukee, instead hanging out her own shingle in Kabul. She studied Shariah, the Islamic code that lies beneath the fragile new Afghan Constitution, and she established herself as the only foreign litigator in one of the world’s most conservative and male-dominated cultures.

She earned respect, she said in an interview, by showing people she was willing to make an effort to understand Afghan culture, even if she would always be an outsider.

Tall, uncovered by a head scarf, outspoken and prone to salty language outside the courtroom, Motley stands out in the courtroom and in a country where many women cannot leave home unless wrapped in a burqa.

“To tell the truth, I get more sexist crap from foreign men than I do from Afghans,” she said in the interview, adding that other lawyers have told her she should defer to her male colleagues or credit her courtroom victories to her male interpreters.

“I try not to complain, because that’s what people want you to do — they want to see weakness,” she said, adding that the abuse does little to deter her.

“There are so many people who believe in me, who depend on me,” she said. “It would be a disservice for me to leave Afghanistan. And it would be a victory for some bad guys if I were to leave.”

In almost eight years practicing law here, Motley has been involved in some of the most important human rights cases of the post-Taliban era. She is perhaps the first independent lawyer to represent a victim of domestic violence in an Afghan court — a woman who had been forced into marriage by her family at the age of 12 and was tortured by her husband. And Motley represented the family of Farkhunda Malikzada, a 27-year-old woman murdered last year after being falsely accused of having burned a Quran.

She has also helped foreigners who have run afoul of Afghan justice and, to pay the bills, she represents the local interests of Western embassies and big foreign companies, including on occasion The New York Times.

“I still make money, that’s a motivating factor,” she said. “But I love representing those clients, people I would never have heard of if I hadn’t gone.”

In a recent case, Motley was asked to help a teenage girl who was born in Afghanistan but raised in Vienna with Austrian citizenship. The young woman was tricked by her parents into returning to Afghanistan to marry a relative, Motley said.

Locked in a house in rural Baghlan province with no family or friends to aid her, the girl surreptitiously contacted Motley (she would not reveal how) to ask for help.

Motley said she sent her “guys,” two groups of local men she trusts — “I know they’ve got my back,” she said — to rescue the girl from a region where the Taliban had recently captured the city of Kunduz. “Everyone up there has a gun, and people are very nervous.”

After two attempts, they sneaked the girl out and ferried her to Kabul. A month later, Motley accompanied her back to Vienna.

The documentary about her career in Afghanistan, directed by Danish filmmaker Nicole Horanyi, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the DOC NYC film festival in November. The jury praised it for having brought viewers “into the world of the fascinatingly brave Kimberley Motley.”

Motley is widely appreciated in the ranks of Kabul’s expatriates. “She’s the only foreign attorney litigating in Afghanistan; that in itself is quite courageous,” Markus Potzel, the German ambassador in Kabul, said. “But I really admire her knowledge. Sometimes she seems to know the Afghan law better than the Afghans themselves.”

The daughter of an African-American U.S. airman and a Korean mother who met at Osan Air Base near Seoul, Motley was born and raised in Milwaukee. She earned her associate degree from Milwaukee Area Technical College, bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and then a law degree from Marquette.

She has set a few best practices for dealing with officials and shady characters in Afghanistan, one of the world’s most corrupt countries — 166th out of 168 in Transparency International’s latest global list. “My rule is, just don’t pay, simply don’t pay, ever,” she said, adding, “Be willing to put something in writing — that scares people. Make a record of it, and let them know you’re making a record of it.”

Motley says she makes a point of closely studying the cultures of both Afghanistan and the courtroom. “I’m a sort of legal archaeologist,” she said. “I try to uncover laws that have not been used, and then use them for the benefit of my clients.”

Sometimes she works through the formal legal system, and at other times she represents clients in the informal jirgas, councils of elders who mete out jurisprudence according to their understanding of Islamic principles.

“I think I give respect, and I get respect. I talk to people in a refugee camp the way I talk to an ambassador,” Motley said of her approach to skeptical Afghans. “And I’m not coming in and saying, ‘This is the way we do things in America.’ I’m coming in and I’m using the Afghan laws and the Holy Quran. People appreciate real people, and I try to be as real as I can possibly be.”

Once she wore a head scarf to court, to help her fit in better. “The judge looked at me and said, ‘What’s that on your head?’” she recalled. “I thought that was really cool. He was saying I didn’t have to do that.”

At a time when most of the nongovernmental organizations that came to Afghanistan have given up, fearful of the Taliban challenge to the embattled government, Motley is not sure how much longer she will be able to practice law here.

She laments the dismal path Afghanistan is on, and the billions of dollars in aid that she says has been wasted here. “This place should look like Dubai, considering all the money that’s been poured into it.”

“And things are getting worse, not better,” she said.

Still, her experience has taught her to recognize the persistent signs of hope: There were only a few licensed lawyers in Afghanistan when she arrived from Milwaukee, and now there are several thousand. “The fact that as an American lawyer I’m allowed to practice here, that’s progress,” she said. “But I accept that there is so much more to be done, at every level.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company