The concrete walls grow higher every year in Kabul, the heaps of sandbags get bigger and fewer foreigners walk the streets - except, strangely, two cheerful young Australians who come striding into a park carrying skateboards.
Children swarm them as they open up backpacks to reveal knee pads, wrist guards and helmets. Small hands grab the equipment and within moments a dry fountain overflows with youngsters zooming around the smooth surface, laughing as they fall down and scramble back up.
Oliver Percovich, 34, emerges from the frolic and sits on the sidelines, keeping his eyes on the children like a worried father. He introduces himself as the project director of Skateistan, the only skateboarding school in Afghanistan, but as he talks it becomes clear that the lessons he hopes to teach go beyond showing kids how to balance on wheeled boards.
"We're pushing some boundaries," he says.
Perhaps the most important lesson from this scene in the park, Mr. Percovich says, is that it's possible to help Afghans without the big salaries, fleets of expensive vehicles and heavy security usually associated with the foreign-aid community.
He flouts the rules that limit the movements of most international staff in Afghanistan, who are often warned to stay away from public gatherings for fear of suicide bombers, and vary their movements in hopes of avoiding kidnappings. Mr. Percovich's small team shows up at the same old fountain several times a week, drawing a crowd of youngsters who giggle with delight at the novelty.
Not that he's entirely unprotected. A few Afghan soldiers lounge casually around the edge of the park, amused but also watchful for anything that might disrupt this oasis of fun in a tough city.
The soldiers are helping out free of charge, part of a web of donations that keep the project alive: volunteer teachers, donated equipment, even a promise of free government land if Mr. Percovich can raise enough money for new skate parks.
His group has written project proposals for skateboarding schools across Afghanistan, detailing how they could spend $200,000, but for now they're just trying to raise $1,200 so they can bring a shipment of donated gear from Australia.
Mr. Percovich says he's trying to get major donors behind the idea. A key message of his pitch is summarized visually on his business card, which carries a logo of a skateboarder flying over a broken Kalashnikov rifle.
"We've gotten some flak about the broken-gun logo, but we're sticking with it," he says. "To an older generation of Afghans, the gun is a positive image because it represents security. But these younger kids in Kabul are a new generation, and they have a different outlook."
As he says this, he is watching a young girl in a purple track suit putting her skateboard on the lip of the concrete bowl. She suddenly tips herself forward into the fountain, sliding smoothly downward.
"That's called a 'drop-in,' " Mr. Percovich says. "She learned that move in two months. It took me four years." He waves her over to talk.
Maharu, nine years old, wears lipstick and proudly declares that some day she will be a doctor - and a professional skateboarder. In a recent competition that pitted the students against each other, including boys and girls, she beat everybody and took home a backpack full of school supplies as her reward.
"The boys were not angry that I beat them, because I practise all the time," Maharu says, with a mischievous grin.
Girls rarely show such precociousness in rural Afghanistan. But here in the heart of Kabul, with tens of thousands of foreign troops trying to keep the Taliban's influence away from the capital, it's possible for girls to feels almost untouched by the war.
Fatana, 11, has relatives in southern Afghanistan but her parents moved to Kabul before she was born, and nobody she knows has been killed or injured in the recent fighting.
"In the Taliban times, girls couldn't play outside," she says. "So now things are better." Even at their age, however, the girls know the situation in Kabul may not continue.
"At first the security situation was good, but now it's not good," Maharu says. "Sometimes we have suicide bombers. I saw burned vehicles on the road. Sometimes we have explosions. But here in Kabul we don't have too many."
A global passion
Skateboarding might have been born on the streets and boardwalks of Southern California, but it has refused to stay there. Kids (and adults) riding planks with wheels have since popped up in some unlikely of places:
Uganda: Kitintale is a suburb of Kampala, and home to the country's first and only skate park. The kids and parents of the area built this park by hand, carrying stones, mixing the materials and smoothing out the mud and concrete themselves. When the first ramp of the park was finished, the kids celebrated by sharing the two skateboards they had between them. They rode these skateboards with bare feet, and tied banana leaves around their knees and elbows for pads.
Lebanon: When things are quiet in Lebanon, the skaters get to ride the streets as much as they want. However, according to Marc, a Lebanese skater, a lot of the time it is "kind of bad ... because of the politics and the bombings. So skaters don't really get to skate outside their houses." But don't think that Marc and his friends let this small inconvenience get them down. He goes on to say, "But it is also nice to skate in Lebanon because it is kind of cool to skate in a war zone, and we learn to appreciate skating more."
Steve Cave,
Special to The Globe and Mail
