Are you allowed to ride a bicycle? For Afghan girls and women, that’s a no. If they dare, people may throw rocks at them or call them unspeakable names. The Global Ride for Solidarity coming up this weekend is designed to catalyze a new cultural paradigm in the country, one that finds riding a bicycle in Afghanistan as normal as walking.
American National Geographic Adventurer and Afghan Cycles Producer Shannon Galpin has spent the last seven years working in Afghanistan, driven it seems by a powerful conviction that bicycles can be used as a conduit for social change and justice – particularly for young girls and women.
She founded the non-profit Mountain2Mountain to provide tools that help women ride their bicycles freely, and is now working really hard to help ensure that athletes can train and compete in a safe environment both at home and abroad.
This includes working with local officials and elders to alter their perspective of the bicycle’s role and worth in a community, and involving them in a movement to normalize female cycling so that it is no longer considered an egregious social taboo.
Original article by Tafline Laylin
Are you allowed to ride a bicycle? For Afghan girls and women, that’s a no. If they dare, people may throw rocks at them or call them unspeakable names. The Global Ride for Solidarity coming up this weekend is designed to catalyze a new cultural paradigm in the country, one that finds riding a bicycle in Afghanistan as normal as walking.
American National Geographic Adventurer and Afghan Cycles Producer Shannon Galpin has spent the last seven years working in Afghanistan, driven it seems by a powerful conviction that bicycles can be used as a conduit for social change and justice – particularly for young girls and women.
– See more at: http://www.greenprophet.com/2014/08/dare-to-ride-your-bike-in-solidarity-with-afghan-women/#sthash.LxYBMapw.dpuf
Continue reading at Green Prophet:
Dare to ride your bike in solidarity with Afghan women?
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