Female instructors Hanifa and Parisa teach the young boys' skate classOn March 8
Skateistan will join the global community in celebrating
International Women's Day (IWD), with events at Skateistan’s project sites in Afghanistan and Cambodia. Worldwide, Women’s Day is a celebration of respect, appreciation, and love for women and their achievements.
This week leading up to IWD, Skateistan has been running a series of small workshops at our facilities so each class can learn what IWD is all about. Although the IWD events will be exclusively for our female staff and students, these workshops will include the male students in Kabul and boy’s groups from our partner NGOs Friends International, Tiny Toones and PSE in Phnom Penh.
The event will provide the girls and women of Skateistan a chance to meet other women involved in Skateistan around the world, both at their local project site and through a live video interaction. The video will make it possible to connect with the women of Skateistan internationally—sharing greetings and smiles across borders.
During the event there will be speeches from female staff members at both project sites. In Kabul, Mariam—who previously spoke at TEDxKabul and received a standing ovation for her ‘Copy/Paste’ talk—will speak on what it means to be a woman in Afghanistan. In Phnom Penh, skate instructor Tin will introduce the day's events and speak of the importance of women's involvement in sport.
The event will also include skateboarding demonstrations and obstacle courses, a concert performance by female musicians (Kabul), Bokator martial arts demonstrations (Cambodia) and female artists running an art workshop with the students to produce a special mural about women and skateboarding.
A young girl gets ready to drop in, Phnom PenhYou can also participate in Skateistan's celebration of women worldwide! Here's how:
During the events, the girls and women present will create visual messages about what it means to be a woman, to be shared with Skateistan's community of supporters worldwide. If you would like to be a part, you can also do this activity yourself and send your photo to Skateistan—we want to represent as many voices as possible!
\n- Choose one word you associate with the word "woman"
- Write or print it in your favorite color
- Take a photo of the word, with yourself or an image that goes with the theme of Women's Day
- Send it to media@skateistan.org
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We will then create a space for this information to be shared with our staff, students, other skaters, and supporters around the world!
Join us and share what it means to be a woman for International Women's Day.
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