I have criss-crossed the country on my over 20 plus trips by motorcycle, bicycle, car, helicopter, plane, skis, and my own two feet. I have experienced Afghanistan through its landscape and its people that shared their stories, their homes, their food, and their dreams with me. My initial projects were in women’s prisons, a women’s heroin rehab center, girls’ and boy’s education in remote mountain villages, and the deaf community in Kabul.
My passion was with the youth culture that I was exposed to on my very first visit in 2008. I worked with a group of Afghan photographers to create a pop-up traveling street art installation Streets of Afghanistan in 2012, and I worked with creatives in Kabul to support the first graffiti workshop for Afghan artists.
In 2009 I became the first person to mountain bike in Afghanistan and soon my work focused around women’s cycling. I began to train and coach the first generation of women to cycle in 2013. I produced a film, Afghan Cycles that documented the National Cycling Team and the first women-founded, women-led cycling team in the central province of Bamiyan over the period of 5 years. Over the eight years that followed, a thriving cycling scene developed across multiple provinces and multiple disciplines. I have spoken at the UN’s Human Rights Council and global conferences around the world about how the bike is a vehicle for human rights and a tool for achieving several of the SDG’s.
August 15, 2021 that all changed when Kabul fell to the Taliban. I began working to evacuate the Afghan cyclists and their family members and continue to do so over one year later. Today cycling is banned, as are all sports for women in Afghanistan, along with education, most jobs outside the home, and traveling without an escort. In just a few short months Afghanistan became the most repressive country for women and girls in the world. The only country to ban sports and secondary education.
My initial pull to Afghanistan was focused on women’s rights and youth culture. But it was buttressed by the desire to understand the truth of what was happening in a country that my own had been ‘at war with’ for forty years through no fault of their own. I wanted to cut through the propaganda of the US media and meet Afghans, see Afghanistan, and find alternatives to support outside of traditional, largely ineffective international aid. I am still fighting that fight. Most recently with the help of lawyers at Hogan Lovells to sumit evidence with Afghan women athletes to the UK Parliament’s gender apartheid inquiry.