Donate NowAfter a week in Mazar-i-Sharif we headed to Kabul for the last few days of our trip in Afghanistan. Our first stop in Kabul, before even dropping our bags off at our guest house, was the Russian pool. We were meeting with a collective of Afghan and Australian skaters called "Skateistan," for a dusk skate. Since Kabul has no skate culture, and no skate parks, the skaters in this newly emergent collective skate at parking garages, empty lots, and on this evening, at an eerie emptied out swimming pool on a hill overlooking Kabul. The pool was built by the Russians during their stint in Afghanistan. The pool's high dive, nearly 30 feet up above the pool basin, looks as if it's the highest point in Kabul. The pool also has a blood-soaked past - the Taliban used it as an execution site during their reign. Today it's been abandoned and is where people come to smoke hash in seclusion. On Friday nights dog fights are hosted here. And now there are skaters too.
Skateistan was started by three Aussies - an aid worker named Sharna, her boyfriend Oliver, and their photographer friend Travis. The three of them are long time skateboarders who ended up working in Afghanistan. They saw a lot of boredom among the urban youth in Kabul and a lot of temptation for kids with nothing to do - from religious extremism to drugs. They introduced skateboarding to a few local teenagers and the sport took off. There isn't anywhere to buy skateboards in Afghanistan yet, but they're working to build a local skate culture. The local skate kids we met have their own Afghan hip hop music they listen to while they skate, in addition to American musicians like Pink.
We talked to one young skater, Hamid Shahram, about the attraction to skateboarding for him and he explained the appeal of the sport eloquently. He told us that past generations in Kabul lived in a culture of violence. Violence touched everything in their lives, including their sports. The national sport of buzkashi, he noted, includes whipping opponents and fighting for a beheaded goat carcass. He told us that young people today are exhausted from conflict and want to do something fun and constructive that doesn't involve violence.
On the evening that we were there with the skaters there was a group of young Pashtun men from Kandahar hanging out on the hill by the pool. The skaters were not Pashtun and did not share a common language with the guys from Kandahar, but before long the Kandahar transplants, in their traditional clothes, were in the pool trying out the boards, holding the hands of the guys from Kabul, in their baggy Western jeans, oversized t-shirts and sunglasses.