I founded a 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 centered inside women's prisons, a women's heroin rehab center, girls' and boys' education in remote mountain villages, and the deaf community in Kabul, but my passion was with the emerging youth culture.
I worked with the newly created Afghan photojournalism center to create 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.
Underlying my work was the taboo of cycling. In 2009, I became the first person 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 violenting 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 evacuated and resettled safely. The whole story is complicated and involves the corruption of the sports and human rights community. Because of them, there are cyclists and human rights defenders left behind.
Today, cycling is banned, as are all sports for women in Afghanistan, along with education, most jobs outside the home, and traveling without an escort. 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 through the bans of walking in public gardens and entering national parks. The most recent ban in 2024 forbids women from speaking in public. Afghanistan is legalizing gender apartheid with the complicity of the international community. Afghan women are engaged in the diaspora to fight back with the help of the UK Gender Apartheid Inquiry and the UN.
My initial pull to Afghanistan in 2006 focused on investigating gender violence and women's rights and the role of international development. But my decision was bolstered by the desire to understand the truth of what was happening in a country that my country had been funding war within for nearly forty years. I wanted to lift the media, film, and news propaganda I was indoctrinated into as a US citizen to meet Afghans, see Afghanistan, and investigate alternatives to traditional international aid models. What I uncovered was horrifying in its wilful corruption and complicity in laundering money back into Western pockets.
I no longer run a non-profit. Every person evacuated and safeguarded was done so through direct mutual aid. I am still fighting to support Afghan women and amplify their stories. Most recently, with the help of lawyers at Hogan Lovells, to submit 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.