Waking up isn't always fun. Most mornings bring about a multitude pains: It's too early, where are my socks?, I should've drank less last night, maybe maybe staying up until 3am playing XBox wasn't the best idea. Regardless of how much the deck can sometimes seems stacked against, there has yet to be a morning that I woke up without hope. Without knowing if I'll be able to eat. Without knowing of whether I will make to bed time (regardless how late it is). Without any sense of future. Total chaos. Little in life is more tragic than a life that has just begun to already exist without hope.
Hearing about foreign lands, with their struggles so far removed, makes it easy to look at the problems holistically. People are killed. Lives are ruined. Women are raped. Suicide bombers explode. It all happens as a single set of data, and as a single problem- a message on the bottom scroll of Fox News. It isn't how things are. Society is an organized collection of individuals, and individuals really aren't that different form one another. Despite this, we've collectively done very little to address the struggles of these individuals, however, where there are individual problems there are individual solutions.
A pair of Australians, Oliver Percovich and Sharna Nolan, were deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan in 2007 armed only with skateboards. Wherever they went children were enamored by the skateboards, and the three skateboards they had became community property. The pair taught the children how to skate. The effect it had on the children's confidence and overall state of being was immediate. Skateistan was born. By the end of 2010 Kabul had an indoor/outdoor skate complex.
Learning how to skateboard, having a place to do it, and having a support network gave hopeless children a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and a momentary reprieve. I allows for goals beside survival. While the project may have begun at skateboarding, but that isn't where it ended. A school was born. Kids used to pointing guns could now point camera lenses. Voices previously silenced could gain resonance with a pen. The school has provided what society could not- a nurturing environment focused on personal growth. Students who show an interest in something, skateboarding or other, are provided the guidance and all available tools to allow the interests to manifest.
On January 29th the full length documentary Skateistan: Four Wheels and a Board in Kabul will be released. Go see it. Better yet donate!
We can't all make it to Kabul or afford to donate (really? $5? Donate $30 and get a shirt? They take PayPal.), but we can be aware that we are all the same and their human struggle is also our human struggle.
As someone who has continued to skateboard into my thirties I can echo the sentiments of Stacy Peralta: “Watching young Afghan skaters in the film made me realize why I’ve spent my entire life as a skateboarder.”
Skateboarding is freedom.
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While these types of programs seem like a good idea, they are often just perpetuating the idea of American exceptionalism and the idea of "the American cowboy" that is so prevalent in today's culture-"Three Cups of Tea", our outpouring of donations after the Haiti earthquake. While these may seem good-spirited and intentioned, they often are done just to make "us" feel better. What really needs to be examined are underlying assumptions about our American values, globalization, foreign policy, etc. If capacity building is the goal (child empowerment), than we must help to build an infrastructure in places we plan on "saving" through a participatory framework. This is true of national development too.
ReplyDeleteI think that's more common sense than anything else. Through a program like this, they aren't trying to create a utopian Afghanistan. This isn't a program for the adults that are struggling. It's for the youth you may not understand the concepts you're laying out. And in nations that are struggling (like Haiti), providing a baseball bat and gloves might be just as important as building a school.
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