Translator: Helena Bowen Reviewer: Denise RQ
So I didn't go to Afghanistan planning to ride my mountain bike.
Does anybody really go to a war zone and think,
"Now if only I'd remembered to pack my single-speed, my Lycra, my helmet."
No, trust me, they don't.
I initially traveled to Afghanistan to work with women and girls.
Afghanistan is repeatedly and consistently ranked
one of the worst places in the world to be a woman,
which is why I chose it as my launching off point.
But an interesting point of fact:
Afghanistan is one of the few countries in the world where girls can't ride bikes,
or horses, or motorcycles, unless they're side-saddle.
But by other point of fact, I consider myself a mountain biker.
Since the first time I rode a single-speed 29er up the rock garden at Hall Ranch,
just north of Boulder,
and as the subsequent bruises and blood donations can attest to,
I seem to thrive with jumping into the deep end.
After working in various places across Afghanistan,
a really curious gender relationship emerged.
As a foreign woman, I resided in sort of a gender-gray area.
I was not a man, but I am not "just" a woman.
I'm essentially a hybrid gender, an honorary man,
and in a segregated society that kind of works in my favor.
The men that I met with invited me into their homes,
I sat with them, ate with them, fished with them,
chewed tobacco with them.
All this in the same home, though, where their women were sequestered off
in an entirely different area all together, never seen or heard from.
So consequently over time, I took to challenging these gender barriers
whenever I could.
Riding a buzkashi horse before a match,
riding motorcycles with the Kabul Knights Motorcycle Club around the country,
and learning to ride myself
in the back roads of Kabul at night.
All things that I did, not only to challenge what a woman should
or should not do, or could or could not do,
but also to experience a country only known for terrorism, oppression,
and poverty through a very different lens.
It was really only a matter of time before the rolling green hills
and the stunning mountains lured me with thoughts of,
"What would it be like to ride those goat paths?"
There are areas of this country that are free of landmines.
So, on my third visit to Afghanistan, on my 35th birthday,
I packed my single-speed, but I left the Lycra at home,
and I put down my tires on a dry river bed in the Panjshir Valley
for the very first time,
something that I've continued to do repeatedly ever since.
In a country where women are not allowed to ride bikes,
I was concerned about the reaction.
But time and time again, the men were not offended.
They were curious, flabbergasted even, and it ended up opening up
this incredible conversation by the side of the road,
in dry river beds, in remote villages in the Panjshir Valley.
Men were so flabbergasted that they would simply open up,
and I got to have these incredible conversations about who I was,
why I was there, what was the work I was doing, why I was there with my bike,
and in return, I got to share a little bit of me and my culture
with men who I would typically only meet in a scheduled meeting
or in more formal situations.
They opened up to me and shared their feelings about their country,
my country, women, sports.
They rode my bike.
I rode theirs.
(Laughter)
Without fail, every conversation that I ever had on bikes
ended with invitations for tea, dinner,
invitations to come back and meet their family, see their village.
The bike had amazingly become an icebreaker,
but more than an icebreaker, bikes are vehicles for social justice.
Around the world, the bike can mean the difference between a life fulfilled,
and a life of oppression.
Nowhere do I see a better example than in rural Cambodia.
In rural Cambodia, many girls do not make it past primary school.
Many for the simple reason that it is too far to walk
to the next secondary school.
So not only is the commute too long by distance,
it's also becoming increasingly dangerous as rape and gender violence
are reaching near epidemic proportions in the rural countryside.
But a bike, access to a bike,
can eliminate one of the key barriers for access to education for girls.
Today organizations are using bike donations
in a variety of ways to spark change, to increase access to education
and medical care, to provide safe alternatives to transportation,
and often simply to instill the joy and freedom that we've all grown up with,
knowing that bikes can change lives.
But in Afghanistan, I was still frustrated.
In Afghanistan, girls simply can't ride bikes.
It's culturally offensive to straddle a bike seat,
and no amount of honorary male exposure
was going to change such deep-rooted cultural views.
Human Rights Watch has said, and this kind of puts it in perspective,
that riding a bicycle for girls in Afghanistan is just one small step
above the morality crimes that many African women are jailed for.
I think it's probably really difficult, especially with a Colorado audience,
to understand, to comprehend,
that a bike would be considered so controversial, offensive even.
So, I would like to take you back and look at our own history,
and women of the 1890s,
and look at how the bike played a role in our own development in our own culture,
because women in this time, dressed as they are in their petticoats
and button-up blouses, these women were labeled immoral and offensive
because they chose to ride bikes.
Something that's pretty hard to understand today,
and yet, when we look back, the bike was literally a key, integral component
to the Women's Suffrage Movement.
These women felt that freedom, and took it forward.
It was viewed as an integral component to the Women's Suffrage Movement,
not just to the feminists who rode the bikes
but by the men who were threatened by the changes that it brought about.
The infamous feminist and activist Susan B. Anthony I think said it best,
"I think the bicycle has done more to emancipate women
than anything else in the world."
In the world!
"It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.
The moment she takes her seat
she knows she can't get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle,
and away she [pedals],
the picture, the symbol, of free, untrammeled womanhood."
But the bike also had an effect on fashion, thank goodness.
Women no longer had to try to ride a bike in those enormous petticoats.
Instead, they made a split skirt, which evolved into bloomers.
But this itself was not without controversy.
People wrote at that time that the women who wore the bloomers
were women who had minds of their own, and tongues that knew how to talk.
(Laughter)
But it wasn't long before those women, with their independent minds
and their tongues that knew how to talk,
were changing the very idea of feminism, fashion, and sport.
A century later, over a century later,
those independent minds are taking root in Afghanistan.
I'd like to introduce you
to the Afghan National Women's cycling team.
(Applause)
These women are breaking the gender barriers
that prevent bikes being used as vehicles for social justice.
They are on the front line in the fight for women's rights in Afghanistan
and after five years of working in Afghanistan,
I have never seen women biking until now.
These women are the first women to ride bikes in Afghanistan,
and they're doing it not to pedal a revolution;
they're doing it because it's fun.
It's a new sport,
and because it makes them healthy and strong,
and because they want to experience the travel that's involved
by competing in different countries, like Pakistan and India.
Showing the world a different view of Afghanistan,
while showing Afghanistan a different view of women.
These women show that bikes can change the world,
and as I continue to work with these amazing women,
I've decided that I also want to bring my work home.
In the wake of the Steubenville Rape
and the current onslaught against women and women's rights in my own country,
I want to work with survivors of gender violence here in the U.S.
and because I believe in the transformational power of bikes,
I want to use the mountain bike as a catalyst.
I want to use it in the way we see bikes
being fundamental agents of change
throughout the world here in the U.S.
There was a beautiful quote in the 1890s that said,
"Riding the wheel, our powers are revealed to us."
I believe our power is in our numbers
and I want to empower the voice and strength
of young women labeled victims,
because I know firsthand, that a victim is only a victim if she believes it.
I want to use the mountain bike
as a catalyst to build strength and camaraderie
with these young women, knowing that together,
they can pedal a revolution in their own communities,
and create ripples of change that reverberate throughout this nation,
throughout the world.
I know that one woman can make a difference.
I know that one voice matters,
but I also believe with all my heart that our strength is in our numbers
and that together, we can pedal a revolution that can change the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)