Why doesn’t anyone report the good news from Afghanistan? Because there isn’t any. Except for this – the story of how a Melbourne skater built the nation’s first mixed-gender school and skate park – Skateistan. By Ben Mckelvey
In a country where decent roads are rare, General Mohammad Zahir Aghbar – head of the Afghan Olympic Committee, whatever that entails – looks proudly at the freshly laid tar that extends out from the highway in Kabul, past the old rusting gates into his Olympic precinct. The former Mujahideen commander poses with one foot resting on the still-cooling road for the benefit of a news crew, who film him then pan across to Ghazi Stadium, where the Taliban used to host double bills of soccer and executions. The camera then zooms in on the precinct’s newest structure – a long flat building, with a domed roof. The door opens and a crew of Afghans wearing helmets and pads charge towards the new road, skateboards under their arms.
Australian dude Oliver Percovich, 36, looks on wearing baggy pants and a battered skate T-shirt. He shouts after the kids. “Don’t let them skate on the General’s new road!”
Smiling, Aghbar puts his hand on Percovich’s shoulder. “This man has a very big heart,” he later tells MAXIM. “One day we will make a statue of him here – the President of Skateistan.”
Percovitch seems on edge. “It’s just a busy day,” he explains. “And an ex-employee told me this morning that he’s going to kill me,” he adds. I ask if that worries him. He says if it did, he wouldn’t be living in Afghanistan.
Most days are busy in Skateistan. Finances, logistics, baffling bureaucracy, syllabus and security – which is currently a man in his 60s standing in front of the facility talking to part of General Aghbar’s much younger, more heavily armed guard – all goes through Percovitch.
Also, he’s trying to knock off early to skate with Murza, an 18-year-old graduate who now works for him.
Murza’s home – the village of Charekar, north of Kabul – has a history of heavy fighting. Escaping to Kabul, he begged, washed cars and sniffed glue. Today, he’s clean and spends much of his time at Skateistan. “Skating is the biggest thing for me. I have to skate all the time. It’s the best thing in my life,” he says.
Before coming to Afghanistan, Percovitch had few of the qualifications required to run Skateistan. His grab-bag of a CV – a little academic work, some social science and chemistry, a small baking business – was the result of, in his own words, a lot of starts and very few finishes.
“I learnt as I went along,” he says. “There are a lot of reasons people are going to stop you from doing something here, but not being qualified isn’t really one of them.”
Percovich landed in Kabul in 2007 after his girlfriend was offered a job there. He then did what he always did in a new city – grabbed his board and hit the streets. Unlike most Westerners in the city – whose movements are limited by security protocols – Percovich had no problem meeting locals. Hell, most of them wanted to have tea with the Australian and his incredible rolling board.
Soon he had a skate crew of locals and ex-pats. They helped him find the best spots the city offered – the empty Amani high school built by Germans in the 1920s, the Bibi Mahru diving pool, never filled with water, but whose 10m platform was once a popular execution spot, and the dry Russian Fountain, built in front of a complex used by Soviet administrators in the 1980s.
Percovich organised a bunch of extra decks and the fountain quickly became a regular spot for skate sessions.
“We were at the same place, same time pretty much every day. If the people who did such things wanted to, they could have got to us whenever they liked. After a while I figured they weren’t that interested. That’s when I first started thinking about what I could do for this place. At the time there was about $2 billion being pumped into the city a month – and you couldn’t see where any of it was going.”
In November 2007, Percovitch traveled to India with the seed of an idea – to set up a combined skate club and school in the Afghan capital.
It sounded like a good way to help the hordes of homeless and often orphaned kids roaming the streets with nothing to do but beg, get high or join the insurgency.
“These kids saw themselves as nothing, because everyone saw them as just that,” he explains. “The place was too ruined and war-ravaged to care. There had been generations of hopelessness, but now there was, for the first time in decades, some childhoods that didn’t have to be defined by war.”
The idea was that he would set up a school where local kids of all classes could come to skate. But when they skated, they also had to study – one hour of each. If only schools in Australia were so forward thinking.
Working the idea through his head in India, Percovich went flying off a motorcycle he was riding and smashed his shoulder, copping multiple fractures that would require surgery in Australia. On the way home, drugged to the eyeballs, he became convinced the school could work.
Back in Kabul, Percovich hit up the Australian embassy for cash. No joy. It was the same at the Canadian embassy. The German embassy committed to $15,000 – but only to build ramps. Percovich was insistent that the facility be indoors. That was the only way girls could be involved.
Finally, he was offered an hour with the Norwegian ambassador. Percovich showed videos of sessions at the fountain and laid out the plans for his school and park.
“He said, ‘I love what you’re doing and it makes total sense to me,’ so they dived in, which was a big step – skateboarding was banned in Norway until 1988.” Norway pledged $200,000.
In the world’s most corrupt country, Afghan reconstruction projects suck up millions of dollars before even breaking ground – if they even do. But Skateistan went up in just months for the price of a shack in rural Tasmania.
“People here are pretty good at estimating how much money they can get out of a project, then stuffing their pockets and running away,” Percovich explains. “But everyone knew we had no money, so this has been built because people actually wanted it built.”
With the Kabul facility now a reality, Percovich has announced that a new Skateistan will soon begin construction at Mazar-i-Sharif, the last city the Taliban took and the first to be liberated by the Northern Alliance.
Heading back to the hotel, I ask my driver Najibullah, a veteran of the pre-Taliban civil wars, what he thinks of the school. “It is a very good thing,” he says. “Until the next war. Then it will probably be filled up with bombs and bullets.” I ask him which “next war” he’s talking about. “There is always a next war,” he replies.
