bump. for an interesting concept.
All the threads I found on Afghanistan were about war. Although the Taliban are in Afghanistan, so is the Afghan Ski Challenge. Hopefully in the future there will be a little more extreme skiing, and a little less extremism. Jokes aside, this is pretty cool.
Hopefully it continues to get off the ground. Women are also getting involved ( inner feminist smiles).
pretty steezy if you ask me.
A snippet from an article;
"The following day, seven Afghan women competed in a separate challenge, the first public event of its kind. Contestants included two pairs of sisters, two others from Bamyan, and Haidary, 23, born in Ghazni province south of Kabul. Haidary came specifically for the event, and drove seventeen hours by car from her parents’ home in Herat. Her husband Ali competed in Friday’s race. Both were their event’s sole snowboarders.
“Girls are not for kitchen. Girls are not for doing just homework,” said Haidary, who worries that her 13 year-old sister is already rushing to become a housewife. “They can do what they want.”
She recalled a checkpoint on the way to Bamyan where truculent men in lungee questioned her about the snowboard in the trunk.
“What is this?” they asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just bringing it for a friend.”
The burqa is all but gone from the streets of Bamiyan, the cultural capital of the Hazara ethnic minority that suffered exceptionally under the Taliban regime, but the event still bucks the mold in the conservative central Asian nation. According to a Newsweek study in 2011 that statistically analyzed human rights data, Afghanistan ranked as the second worst country in the world for women.
A “women’s ski race” is a shocking concept even in white-collar circles in the capital. I told a friend in Kabul about the event.
“Were they half naked?” he asked."
