Amid bad news, Afghan robot builders aim to inspire
It’s not easy to get robotics equipment through customs in Afghanistan, but that didn’t deter this bunch.
For months, a team of six teenage girls has been scrambling to build a ballsorting robot that will compete in an international competition. Other teams received their raw materials in March. But the box sent from the U.S. had been held up for months amid concerns about terrorism. So the young engineers improvised, building motorized machines from household materials.
They didn’t have time to waste if they were going to compete in the FIRST Global Challenge, an international robotics competition to be held this month in Washington, D.C.
To participate, the girls from the city of Herat in western Afghanistan needed permission to travel to the United States. So, after they convinced their parents to let them go, they made the 500-mile journey to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to apply for their visas. They did this twice.
But then the team got some bad news: Their visa applications had been denied. When the girls heard the news, “they were crying all the day,” said Roya Mahboob, one of the team’s sponsors.
According to recent State Department records, it’s particularly hard to get a business travel visa from Afghanistan. Just 112 were granted in May, 2017; 780 visas were issued to visitors from Iraq and 4,067 from Pakistan.
Mahboob said she thinks the teenagers still can inspire others. They’ll have to watch their robot compete via Skype. “In Afghanistan ... it’s a very man-dominated industry,” Mahboob said, according to Newsweek. “The girls, they’re showing at a young age that they can build something.”