You attract young boys on bikes.
They surround you, they call out to you.
Some throw rocks, some aim them low
so it’s just to get your attention, some aim at you.
Most of them want to just ride bikes with you.
What I found was that you attract more attention,
but you’re attracting the good kind of attention.
You’re attracting camaraderie, you’re attracting joy.
The problem for me was every single ride
realizing that girls were unable to do this.
This was the view of the girls.
They’re watching me ride, they’re watching the joy,
they’re watching the boys ride, and they’re not allowed.
And it’s heartbreaking,
and it’s… unfair.
What I started to look at was…
the question that would come up is
does it even matter whether girls ride bikes.
So girls can’t ride, aren’t there bigger issues?
The bike was a key component of
our own women’s rights movement in the US.
And I started digging back
into our own history of the Suffragettes
and what was the reaction when US women,
when American women started riding bikes.
You know, Susan B. Anthony, one of the, you know…
the voices of that time, the fact that she says that it was
“a tool that has done more for emancipating women
than anything else in the world”, I mean…
that’s astounding.
Much like the young women in Afghanistan
that are now riding bikes.
I found out that there was a Men’s National Cycling Team.
No one I knew had ever heard of such a thing.
Men and boys ride everywhere, you see them…
everywhere, across the streets
it’s the most common mode of transportation.
But never girls.
But they’re not, they’re never doing it for sports.
Cycling is not an Afghan sport.
Football and cricket are the Afghan sports.
And so, I asked to meet this young man.
It turns out he was a waiter
at a cafe that I had gone to before.
And then the really fascinating thing was
he found out that I rode bikes
and invited me to come for a ride with the team.
Of course, I immediately say yes.
Although I am a little nervous about
riding on the Afghan highways.
Trucking, it’s a trucking route.
You’ve got the big Pakistani jingle trucks blowing by.
There’s no rules of the road.
Most Afghans have not taken a drivers license test.
And we meet at this petrol station.
As we’re all gathering,
you see boys starting to come from different directions.
The coach arrived in his car.
And he’s got his… assistant with him.
A young woman, beautiful, strong features.
She looks tough.
And he’s furious.
“Why has nobody told me that there’s a foreign woman
coming to ride with the men’s team?
It’s putting her at risk, it’s putting you at risk.”
And he’s like, in my face, yelling at me.
And once he gets it out of his system
’cause that very kind of Afghan to just get it out,
then he shakes my hand, he says, “welcome.”
( audience laughter )
Okay…
“Why are you here?” And I said, “well, I ride bikes.
I used to be a sports trainer in a prior life.
And I’m a mountain biker.
And the boys, you know, invited me to come and ride with them.
I didn’t mean any offense,
they didn’t tell me anything about you.
And, who is this woman with you?”
And he says, “well, this is Mariam. She’s my assistant,
but she’s also on the Afghan National Women’s team.”
I’m like, “women’s team…
How did this come to be?
I’ve been looking for women for three years.
I’ve never met one family that
would allow their girl to ride a bike.
Or that… any girl I’ve ever met or
woman who has ridden a bike.”
And he said that when he started the men’s team,
which is pre-Taliban time.
And then had to stop because of the Taliban time,
he had wanted to start a girls’ team.
He didn’t see any reason not to.
And he started with his own daughters.
As is always the case, it’s you know, that family connection.
He wanted his girls to experience the joy of riding.
I asked if I could meet the team.
Of course, he allowed and I met with the girls.
And said, “how can I help? I mean, this…
we are kinda coming full circle in my journey here.
Like, how do I help support these young women?”
This is exactly what I had always hoped was that
we’d find a way that we could normalize bikes
so that we could get girls bikes to get to schools.
And so that we could reduce the gender violence.
So that when girls are walking the gauntlet
in an urban environment where they’re
getting acid thrown at them,
where they’re kidnapped, where there’s rocks thrown,
where they’re being attacked,
we can give them a really simple tool.
When they’re in rural areas and can’t access medical care
or can’t access a school
they have the ability to travel a greater distance.
And we need, then we need fewer resources,
we don’t need as many schools
if we can bring more people to them.
Then we can spend that money on more teachers.
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