SKATE ISTAN
For 13 years the NGO Skateistan has pioneered the pursuit of skateboarding as a catalyst for educational and social uplift for children in some of the most deprived and challenged communities in the world. Its founder shares the thinking behind skateboarding’s greatest move.
Oliver Percovich moved to Afghanistan in 2007, hot on the heels of his then girlfriend who had accepted a job in Kabul. It wasn’t long before he realised the uselessness of his chemistry degree: “I felt helpless faced with all the problems and suffering I encountered every day. I should have studied medicine, architecture – anything that might have been useful to a country scarred by war.” He had brought a few of his skateboards (“I started skating in 1980, 41 years ago”), which he rode around the city’s ruined neighbourhoods while trying to figure out what to do with his life. He immediately noticed how the kids stared at him as if he were an alien or some mythological wheeled creature. They often asked if they could have a go on his awesome gadget that let him zoom around so effortlessly. Their curiosity in the new prevailed over their fear of the unknown.
As he explored Kabul, Percovich became a sort of Christopher Columbus in reverse. Instead of discovering an unknown country, it was he who introduced the locals to something they had never seen before. Initially just as an entertaining and supportive pastime, he started arranging meetups where he’d teach the basics of skateboarding to kids who sold chewing gum and knick-knacks to passers-by, cleaned cars at road junctions for a few cents, or got up to no good loitering on the streets from morning to evening. He gave them a passion, but also the perseverance to nurture it. He showed them how to push off with their back foot, dodge the rubble, ollie over cracks in the asphalt, carve turns in the circular basin of an empty fountain, and skirt around the majestic ruins of bombed-out buildings. There was a mutual understanding that had no need for words.
“Young people from different ethnic groups and all kinds of social backgrounds would turn up at the gatherings. A few were rich, but many others were very poor. A different identity began to take shape among them. They were no longer Tajik or Hazara – they were skateboarders.”
The skating spirit also cut across genders. “Girls came along too. I’d noticed they never played any kind of sport, but skating was allowed by their parents and tolerated by strangers because it didn’t fit any known category. The rules couldn’t forbid something that was uncharted by social norms. Even with time, people looking at it from the outside continued to misunderstand it.” They let girls skate because they saw skateboards as a kind of exotic toy. It was a form of escape not forbidden to women, saved by its newness and then its ostensible innocence.