Skating to Kabul~Half Pipes and Whole Hearts
February 27, 2012 1 Comment
(Erika got to Kabul via skateboard. In 2009 she and a few other women friends were passing around an article they had read in the New York Times. The women—who regularly produced a women’s skateboarding zine—were all avid skaters. Erika’s friend Rhianon got in touch with Oliver and volunteered to join Skateistan. In May 2010 she set off for Kabul to help build a skate park and education programs for boys and girls. She is still involved with the organization today.
As Rhianon sent updates from Kabul, Erika began to understand that the “reality on the ground [in Kabul]” was more complex than the IED-centric news reports. “Hundreds of girls going to skateboard once a week,” Erika said, “I knew that had to be something special.” And so she found herself reminding people in her life—many who strongly opposed her decision to move to Kabul for six months to help provide Afghani youth with opportunities to play and learn—that “the plane flies both ways.”
The pressure to not go was fairly strong. One of Erika’s professors at university wrote her an email in which he strongly advised her to cancel her plan. Her father cried. Her mother, however, supported her choice and wished her the best luck. “My mom really trusts my judgment and knows I know how to take care of myself.”
Once there, she was overwhelmed by beauty and disaster. “Never before in my life had I met kids who had so much energy and so much joy. There were hard times too, which totally broke my heart, but I guess that is the point of the program—to create a space for kids to be kids.” When asked about the pervasive violence in Kabul and how it affected her, the program, and the kids, she told me, “The attacks seemed few and far between but the poverty is widespread and constant.” Living in a “regular house” (rather than a compound filled with foreign diplomats and aid workers) in Kabul and interacting with Afghans day-in and day-out, Erika “found the day-to-day stuff much more difficult to deal with.” The tent cities, abject poverty, and children running through traffic to sell chewing gum to help support their families…this was the stuff of constant suffering and it was hard for Erika to bear.
It doesn’t take too long to see and feel Erika’s expansive heart. She’s open, thoughtful, and powerfully sincere. She’s the rare sort of character who takes in her environment, processes it, and gives back love. Talk to her and you’ll feel it. This wholeness clearly informed her work at Skateistan. She taught “tons and tons of skateboarding” as well as environmental health classes that included lessons about safe drinking water and sanitation and a neighborhood clean up, during which kids collected trash and pulled from it materials to make recycled art objects.
There was also a theater project—kids wrote their own scripts, made their own costumes, and put on their own plays. The theater project was an excellent way for kids—those with and without the ability to read and write—to express their concerns. “The girls wrote a lot about not being able to go to school or to Skateistan and the boys wrote about things like having to work to make money to support their parents’ drug habits.”
As Skateistan’s Education Coordinator, Erika made sure that all programs were accessible to all kids. Most Afghan children have had no schooling at all or have had irregular access to school. Skateistan’s approach to teaching and learning is conversational—it’s built on two questions: What can the international staff teach the Afghans? What can the Afghans teach the international staff? A radically different approach than that taken by traditional aid programs, which implement programs from above and behind the walls of a heavily guarded compound. “I think the fact that people working with Skateistan were amateurs was a good thing. We’re really flexible and we want to learn from our experience.” Erika reflected.
Before traveling to Kabul in June 2010 to work at Skateistan “I never knew or thought about development—skateboarding brought me there….I did do a lot of volunteer work…but I never thought it was a way of life” or a job. However, after arriving in Kabul, Erika says she realized “what development is doing and how ineffective it is.” Her main complaint was the fact that most aid workers she observed or encountered in Afghanistan rarely left their compound. They would spend months, even years, in country and might know one or two Afghans at work but would rarely interact with Afghans outside the walls of the compound. “They don’t really know the guy in the veggie stand or at the bakery, and they don’t know their neighbors or go to the market. They’re disconnected from the activities and the struggles of daily life.” She says.
Erika’s experience was very different and a powerful testament of what can happen when we deconstruct the walls that divide us and prevent us from connecting with others. “I’m really grateful to have had this opportunity,” Erika cried, “I really love the place and the people. I really had the chance to see not what’s different but what’s the same. I never before met kids with so much love. For a lot of them it’s the one thing in their lives that’s constant and a source of happiness.”
These days Erika is studying for her master’s in Berlin but she continues to support Skateistan and her kids in Kabul. “I’m married to this organization. No matter how upset I get sometimes, my heart is there and it’s something I’ll always do.” She continued, “I learned so many things from it and that’s the best part of education…you learn so much more than you can ever teach anyone else.”
Who needs a schoolhouse when you’ve got a skate park?
