REUTERS – A group of Afghan teenagers, decked out in makeshift protective gear, gather on a dusty hill on the outskirts of the capital Kabul to practice a variety of freestyle cycling tricks they have learnt from online videos via YouTube, Facebook and other social media.
Brushing aside suicide bombings, they are part of Afghanistan’s first freestyle cycling club ‘Drop and Ride’, established two months ago to help keep young Afghans away from drugs, petty crime and violence.
The hill offers this group of boys a more rural terrain, but back in the capital, the rest of the club of 50 mostly teenage Afghans, including 15 women, use a concrete football compound as their playground.
As the evening sets in, members mount their often-rickety bicycles and warm up, as metal tables, wooden crates and boxes are turned into make-shift obstacle courses, and used to perfect the stunts learnt online.
“The biggest challenge that we face is insecurity. We are not confident about our safety when we go out for exercise,” said the club’s founder, 18-year-old Asghar Mehrzada.
Mehrzada said the group is attracting a lot of interest from young Afghans, who pay a membership fee of 400 afghanis ($6.01) per month. He hopes the Afghan government and international aid groups will help fund its expansion with better bicycles and facilities.
For the club’s female members, they hope their pop-a-wheelies, bunnyhops and backflips will trailblaze a new path for future generations in the conservative Muslim nation, where exercising women are often the subject of public scorn.
“People keep harassing us most of the time and they see girls cycling as a bad thing, but our goal is to make sure that sport is part of women’s life,” Zahra Ronna, 18, told Reuters wearing a black Nike hat on her red and white bicycle. “We are tired of war and we want to practice new things in our lives like this sport.”
“Although we have lots of problems in our country… whenever I come to the club and exercise here, it gives me a huge amount of energy and joy and I feel like I am flying,” said Fatima Mahdawi, 32, one of the group’s older female members.
Under the Taliban in the 1990s, women in Afghanistan were excluded from public life banned from going to school or stepping outside their home without a male family member.
Women’s rights have made gains since the hardline Islamist group’s ouster in 2001, but observers worry that progress is at risk as violence against women persists and women remain under-represented in politics.
