Combat Apathy’s major project today is supporting the development of an Afghan Women’s Sport Archive. Preserving the history of the first generation of Afghan athletes that participated in 8 sports that were founded between the two Taliban regimes. They will create a blueprint for expanding the archive to include all Afghan women’s sports. Oral histories and witness statements have begun being recorded in 2025.

Combat Apathy was formed in 2011 to serve as an umbrella for social justice art and culture projects. The first appearance of the logo was on brass bracelets commissioned to support Mountain2Mountain’s initial work with the Afghan National Cycling Team. The film crew of Afghan Cycles all wore a bracelet on the first production trip in May 2013.

The love grenade logo was visible on the sleeve of the first cycling jerseys designed to support the women’s cycling program and the first Afghan National Cycling Team jerseys.

I founded the non-profit, Mountain2Mountain, in 2006 to focus on women's rights projects in Afghanistan. I spent a decade working in Afghanistan and have crisscrossed the country by motorcycle, bicycle, car, helicopter, plane, skis, and hiking on my own two feet. I have experienced Afghanistan through its landscape and its people who shared their stories, homes, food, and dreams with me.

My initial projects ranged from inside women's prisons, Kabul’s women's heroin rehab center, girls' and boys' education in remote mountain villages, and the deaf community in Kabul building a permanent home with ANAD thanks to a land donation from President Karzai. My passion was with the emerging youth culture: artists, athletes, activists.

I collaborated directly with Afghans. One of my first projects was with the newly established Afghan photojournalism center, AINA, to develop a pop-up traveling street art installation, Streets of Afghanistan. I supported creatives in Kabul to support the first graffiti workshop for Afghan artists with Combat Communications. I sought out the young storytellers and activists.

My first visit to Afghanistan focused on investigating gender violence and women's rights, as well as the role of international development. I was bolstered by the desire to understand the truth of what was happening to women in a country that my country had been engaged in arming and funding wars within for forty years. I wanted to meet Afghans, explore Afghanistan, and investigate alternatives to traditional international aid models. What I uncovered was a horrifying system of wilful corruption and complicity by international aid organizations laundering money back into Western pockets.

Underlying my work was the taboo of cycling. In 2009, I became the first woman to mountain bike in Afghanistan, and I continued to use cycling as a tool to investigate the gender barrier across the country for nearly a decade. The barrier cracked open sooner than I anticipated, and I began to train and coach the first generation of women cyclists in 2013. Alongside my projects, I wrote books and brought an all-woman film crew to Afghanistan to produce a film, Afghan Cycles, that spent the next five years documenting the National Cycling Team and the first women-founded, women-led cycling team in Bamyan.

In one decade, a thriving cycling scene for women and girls developed across multiple provinces and disciplines. But that was violently erased on August 15, 2021, when Kabul fell to the Taliban. I worked to evacuate the original and current Afghan cyclists and their family members. Over 150 Afghan women and family members were evacuated and resettled safely.

In just a few short months, Afghanistan became the most repressive country for women and girls in the world. It is now the only country to ban sports, secondary education, and access to nature and the outdoors, as evidenced by the restrictions on walking in public gardens and entering national parks. The most recent ban forbade women from speaking too loudly in public. Afghan women are engaged in the diaspora to fight back with the help of the UK Gender Apartheid Inquiry and the UN.

I am still fighting to support Afghan women and amplify their stories.

Most recently, with the help of lawyers at Hogan Lovells, I submitted evidence with Afghan women athletes to two essential inquiries: the UK Parliament's gender apartheid inquiry and the UN's special report on gender abuse in women's sport. Thanks to the lawyers at Hogan Lovells, I was also able to successfully bring an abuse case against the Afghan Cycling Federation President at the UCI Ethics Commission on behalf of the Afghan cyclists who were being harassed and threatened during the evacuation. He was found guilty in July 2024. The athletes, however, have never seen any reparations or support from the ACF or UCI.

I supported and trained with the first generation of women cyclists from 2012 to 2016. During this period, the Afghan National Women's Team became internationally recognized with an exhibition in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, National Geographic Adventure, and a nomination of the national cycling team for a Nobel Peace Prize as part of an overall bid by an Italian committee to nominate the Bike as a 'Vehicle for Peace.'

I began mountain biking in Afghanistan in 2009. I started exploring the country on my mountain bike, both as a way to experience the country differently and to interrogate the gender barrier. No Afghan women or girls were riding in Afghanistan. It was a cultural taboo, and while I heard vague rumors and stories of Afghan women riding in the south in the 1960s, there were no physical records of it to be found because the Taliban had destroyed so much history when they controlled the country. What remains is the oral history preserved by family members. The first generation of cyclists began decades later, in 2011. I started to support them in 2012 after I met their captain, Marjan Seddiqe.

Thanks to the bravery of Afghan women and girls over one decade, women's cycling grew from a handful of young women on a cycling team in Kabul to girls' teams and clubs in multiple provinces, training and racing in road cycling, mountain biking, and BMX. The sport was incredibly dangerous for women and girls and was still considered taboo by conservative Afghans at the time that Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Today, cycling is banned like all sports for Afghan girls. Under the Taliban's imposed gender apartheid edicts, almost everything is banned for women and girls; school, work, most public and private spaces, even walking in the public gardens and visiting the national park, restricting freedom of movement and outdoor access for women and girls. Today, even the sound of a woman's voice is banned. The fight to dismantle gender apartheid has only just begun. Thanks to support from the law firm Hogan Lovells, I have been able to gather testimony from Afghan athletes to submit to the UK gender apartheid inquiry and continue to fight for women's rights despite the Taliban's control of the country. 

The evacuation of Afghanistan's first generation of female cyclists and the current cycling teams took place with numerous partners and supporters and was financed by crowdfunding and individual donors. The total number is unknown, but through my efforts alongside partners, over 150 Afghans, mainly cyclists and their family members, along with human rights defenders and journalists, were evacuated and resettled into ten different countries. This group included all the original national team members and cycling leadership from Bamyan and Kabul that I knew, supported, and rode with from 2013 to 2016. While most of the day-to-day work was finished in late 2022, the most recent evacuations and resettlements occurred in the summer of 2024. The work is not over. And for those safe in the diaspora, their safety has meant the collapse of their teams, their dreams, and the right-to-ride movement that they were part of.  

From 2013 to 2018, I was a producer on the Let Media documentary Afghan Cycles, which documented the first generation of Afghan women to cycle for sport in multiple provinces and premiered at Toronto's Hot Docs Film Festival. My memoir, Mountain to Mountain, documented my first experiences mountain biking and investigating the gender barrier. I wrote several articles and acted as a field producer or logistics support for several feature and short films. 

Endangered Activism is a mother-daughter collaboration to explore education outside the classroom and learn about extinction and wildlife conservation solutions from local experts around the world.

We co-created this project to focus on field research storytelling, learn the best solutions in local conservation, and find creative solutions for storytelling in urban and youth communities that aren’t traditionally tied to conservation. We spent her 7th-grade year traveling for 14 months and immersing herself in field research around the world. Devon interviewed biologists, rangers, scientists, conservation leaders, and researchers in Namibia, Borneo, and Argentina about local solutions to the global problems of extinction and climate change. Returning home to Colorado, we visited a warehouse that stored the illegal animal goods seized at the US border. Rows of big cat carcasses, elephant tusks, rhino horn, and bags of pangolin scales. A warehouse proving that the money funding the extermination of wildlife linked back to the country we had left.

Devon’s focus on giving voice to the issue was on graphic novels and street art projects. We co-wrote the graphic novel, The Rosette, and brought Mariana Prieto on to illustrate it. We launched the street art project #WhatWeLose in collaboration with Mexican artist Diana Garcia, in Paris, Oxford, and Denver, Colorado.

Our journey was documented in its entirety, and we are now ready to transform our experiences into a coming-of-age documentary. This film not only showcases our field research but also highlights the use of street art as a unique storytelling medium. Now Devon is 20, and has returned to Namibia and Malawi to work directly with the biologists and field researchers she admired and met when she was twelve. She starts university to earn a degree in wildlife conservation, while continuing to spend as much time in the field studying big cats as possible.

Climate justice, gender violence, Palestine, anti-war, LGBTQIA+ rights, Transgender rights, gender equality, abortion rights, Black Lives Matter, and voting rights…. I have protested and organized in the streets in multiple countries, exercising my right to assemble, my right to protest, and my freedom of speech as a stakeholder and as an ally. I believe that change comes from the ground up, from community-led movements, not handed down from our governments. We have a responsibility to act when our governments aren’t listening.

I choose to engage in several forms: through art, through my humanitarian work, through my writing, through sit-ins and demonstrations, and through protest in solidarity with the community. I believe all of these movements are intertwined; we cannot separate climate justice from Palestine from gender violence, from trans rights, voting rights, abortion rights, and from the general overall anti-war movement that focuses on decolonization. These issues are not isolated, just as we are not isolated from them as individual humans; they are part of an interconnected web of social justice struggles that require us to recognize our liberation weaves across borders and identity politics.

"No one is free until all of us are free."