Skateistan founder on the power of skateboarding

 

Here’s an inspiring story for a summer Friday and in celebration of Go Skateboarding Day yesterday about Oliver Percovich, the founder of Skateistan skate school in Afghanistan.

 

I interviewed Oliver at the IASC Skateboarding Summit this month, and found out more about how one man who loves skateboarding rallied the support to build a thriving skate school that serves girls and boys in a $1 million, indoor skatepark and educational facility in two years.

 

Skateistan has become so successful, it has the support of several foreign governments and is expanding to other parts of the country and to other troubled nations.

 

Oliver seems to have no fear. He and some others from Skateistan have even skated Jalalabad Road, considered the most dangerous road in the world.

 

Here are excerpts from my interview with Oliver at the skate summit. Oliver grew up skateboarding in Australia but was never a professional – it was just one of his favorite things to do.

 

Why skateboarding? Why Afghanistan?

Oliver Percovich: Skateboarding took me lots of different places – 42 countries before actually ending up in Afghanistan. I followed my girlfriend to Afghanistan at the time, who got a job there as a researcher.

 

Oliver Percovich. Photo by Shop-eat-surf.

I just had three boards with me. I was looking for a job, and what happened is that I made a connection with Afghanistan because everywhere I went people were extremely friendly.

 

I started skateboarding with kids in the street, and I saw that it was something that they were really connecting with. They begged me to bring more skateboards, and I contacted people in the industry, and got skateboards to Afghanistan, and it all grew from there.

 

I’m just trying to imagine what that was like. Here is this Australian – skating with kids around the streets of Kabul? Was this acceptable?

We slowly introduced skateboarding. There were the skate sessions at the fountain, and at first, there were just boys doing it, and slowly we got girls to also take part.

 

We took some photos. The girls took them to their parents. They put the photos on the fridge, and from that, there was also the acceptance from the parents. The parents saw the change in the children, just how much fun that they were having, and so the families of the children started to accept what we were doing, as well.

 

I noticed that it was just something that was very special, the fact that we were able to do a sport with girls.

 

Girls don’t play soccer there because it’s seen as an activity for males. Any of the popular sports in Afghanistan are seen as activities for boys, and so where we actually got girls involved, it was only up to the age of 12 because in Afghanistan, girls and boys needed to be separated from 12 years onward.

 

The idea was starting to form that if we could build an indoor facility, then girls older than 12 could also take part.

 

And something that was really important was, “How can these children, also, access education?” So the idea started to come together to build a facility to do both – to get girls between the age of 12 and 17 to also be able to skate and also do some more activities with the kids than just skating because what was important is that this youth demographic is engaged with.

 

The international community and all of the efforts that were being made were looking at over-20-year-olds, and that’s not where the action was, but nobody else knew how to engage with kids, and here we were doing it with skateboards.

 

 

See Page 2 for more about Skateistan and founder Oliver Percovich

 

 

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How did you go from skating around a fountain to moving into a million-dollar facility and having the skate school and also other activities and classes?

As the idea came to build a facility, I started to look for land. We were given land on two different occasions, and it was taken away again because people thought that I would pay a whole lot of money to just have access to that land, and I didn’t have any money. I was living on carrots and potatoes and onions for $10 a week, so I couldn’t pay any bribes to anybody to get the land. So we finally, after about a year and a half, the Olympic Committee offered me a piece of land.

 

The Afghan Olympic Committee?

The Afghan National Olympic Committee – and I had talked to a couple of different embassies to try to get some funding support for this idea of building a skate park. And the Olympic president asked me if I could do the facility double the size of what I had planned, and I thought, “Well, okay, then we’ll need double the money.”

 

But in the end, all of the pieces came together. We got the land. I pieced together the money. We got a building company to build the facility that would normally cost in excess of $1 million for $200,000 for Skateistan. All of a sudden, we had the largest indoor sports facility in the country, and it was a skate park, as well as a school.

 

What timeline are we talking about from when you started?

It was around two years. We opened in October 2009.

 

You obviously have had to navigate a lot of challenges. The gender issue, the ethnic issue, not being a Muslim. Can you just tell us how you’ve dealt with some of those?

We have separate days for the boys and the girls, so the girls have female teachers, and that gets the support of the parents to actually send their daughters to the sessions.

 

Skateistan also educates kids, including this group of street children. Skateistan offers an accelerated learing program to get them caught up for Afghan schools. Photo courtesy of Skateistan.

We also teach respect in our space. It’s very important that we also make sure that the children come from different ethnicities, so it’s not just all Pashtun or not just Tajik in each class.

 

So we’re encouraging them to mix across ethnic lines in the skate park, in the classroom, in those activities, and it’s important that they show respect to each other when they’re doing it.

 

We had a skate competition, and we invited prominent mullah to the competition, and he asked, “What should I talk about?” And I said, “Well, what about the importance of women doing sport?”

 

And he told a story of the Prophet Muhammad encouraging his wife to take part in a running race. It was an example that was countering a lot of other information. And it was important that it came from a prominent person so there was the acceptance from the parents because parents also came to attend this event. We’ve got to do things carefully, but it is possible to navigate those things.

 

What about safety? Have you ever felt threatened? Is the facility secure? Has anything ever happened to your students there?

No, nothing. I mean nothing has happened to any students. I’ve had numerous threats, but usually only from people that I’ve fired. I’ve had death threats that I guess didn’t take so seriously, but maybe I need to.

 

It is a lawless place, but the way that we stay safe is by the relationships that we have. It’s the street kids that know what’s going on, or the president of the Afghan Olympic Committee. I’m a volunteer advisor to him. He used to be the deputy minister of the interior, so that is in charge of security for the country. So through my relationships, I know. I mean our guards aren’t going to actually protect us – they are stoned the whole time. They’re not going to protect us from the Taliban.

 

So you have a lot of support in Afghanistan from a lot of different governments – the Embassies of Norway, Denmark, the Foreign Office of Germany. From the outside, I think, “skateboarders, government officials – is that a natural mix?” How have you made those alliances?

It was important to get large amounts of money to build large infrastructure and take on big projects, so I simply tried to go there with all of the facts and just took it very seriously and wanted to be taken seriously by government officials.

 

It was a process of building trust with them, and we were delivering results on the ground. So I think that was something that people latched on to. In Afghanistan, it’s extremely difficult to put results on the ground.

 

It’s pretty funny with Norway because in Norway, in the ’80s, skateboarding was actually banned, and they were one of our first biggest sponsors, so I was quite proud of that.

 

 

See Page 3 for details about what life in Afghanistan is like, expansion plans

 

 

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How long are you planning to stay in Afghanistan, and if it’s not forever, how will the program sustain itself without you?

I committed to 10 years at the start, and I’ve been five years in Afghanistan now. Now, all or our programs are actually run by Afghan staff, so that’s a huge achievement. I know that my presence helps keep things working well, and I’m trying to slowly decrease involvement.

 

Are you expanding to other countries?

We’re building a brand-new project not in another country but in the north of Afghanistan, in Mazar-e-Sharif that’s going be double the size of the one in Kabul and we’ll be able to have 1,000 kids, weekly, there.

 

We’ve got another project that’s started in Cambodia that’s been running for about a year, and that’s got about 10 staff and about 200 kids there.

 

We hope to go to lots of other countries, especially places where it’s really hard to put results on the ground, places that get thrown in the “too hard” basket – Yemen, South Sudan, Libya come to mind.

 

Every garden spot in the world. So how is the skateboard industry helping you? And what other kind of help do you need?

A Skateistan skate demo on International Women’s Day. Photo courtesy of Skateistan.

We’ve had support from the skateboard industry from day one, and I think without the skateboard industry helping us, it wouldn’t have happened. I mean I didn’t really have any money, but I asked Black Box Distribution from Australia, back in the day, whether I could get a whole lot of equipment, and they gave me the go-ahead within two days. Thank you Black Box.

 

And then we’ve got a shoe with Fallen (a Skateistan/Fallen collaboration – Black Box owns Fallen). We’ll have a new shoe coming out soon, as well. We had support from TSG. They’ve supplied us with safety gear. We’ve got a co-branded helmet and pad set with TSG. We’ve had support from Theeve Trucks since last year, and we’ll have a co-branded truck with them soon.

 

We got a whole lot of wheels from Bones, but they turned us down on a co-branding, so anybody who wants to get involved with wheels, then we’re open. IOU Ramps has built all of our skateboard parks free. All we had to do is come up with the equipment.

 

We wouldn’t have been able to do it without the skate industry’s support. And I know that it’s been really lean times, so it’s much appreciated.

 

But what else do you need?

Simply people to get behind us. Simply words of support, spreading things on social media, all of those things help us a lot, but I guess, any amounts of money also definitely help.

 

We’ve registered our logo and trademarked our name everywhere that’s covered by the Madrid Protocol so we can enter into licensing agreements. They can generate an income, and we’ve just got a new product, which is a book that will be out soon and distributed by Block Box and also available online.

 

For five years you’ve lived in Afghanistan. What your life is like there?

It’s tough. And we just went through winter, and we had two and a half months of frozen pipes, so you couldn’t flush the toilet. You couldn’t wash your hands. You couldn’t run the washing machine. It was so cold. It was, I think, 5 degrees Fahrenheit. It was -15 Celsius in the office. We were in sleeping bags at the office. There’s rubbish everywhere in the street. There’s sewage coming into the street. It smells.

 

In wintertime, people are burning plastic, so the whole – the air, just to keep warm, everybody’s just getting whatever rubbish they can and burning it. So the air quality is almost that you can’t breathe. It’s difficult.

 

We live in a regular Afghan house in a regular neighborhood. I guess we don’t have those things that a lot of other foreign projects have that make the overhead so high. We don’t run generators. We don’t have stable electricity supply. Those things cost a lot of money, so we just try to live like the locals, and it means that we’ve got low overheads, and it means that if we can then generate income for ourselves we’re sustainable.

 

The whole idea is not to get trapped into this aid bubble. Aid in Afghanistan makes Kabul extremely expensive, all of the aid money flowing in, and we’re, then, in competition with every other international organization that is then putting a whole lot of money to attract people into different jobs. And so it’s expensive and tough, but it’s home and –

 

It is home. You consider it home.

It is. I definitely consider it home. So I’m there around 10 months of the year, and I’m trying to slowly make that a little bit less as I go along. But Afghans are awesome, they’re really tough people. They’re extremely good friends, and I think they look through people. They’ll size you up and see where you’re at. There’s no bullshit – it’s very interesting.

 

What’s your ultimate goal? Where where do you want this all to go?

As far as it can. It didn’t come from my idea of going to Afghanistan and starting a skateboarding project. It simply came from a passion of skateboarding and seeing that the children shared that same passion, and it was following what they were interested in.

 

It’s a model that is working, so it’d be nice to expand it, but we want to do things in a very high quality way. We don’t want to just plunk down a skate park or throw out some skateboards. What we’re looking at is connecting youth to each other and giving them the tools that they need to solve problems in their lives, in their societies.