The following Article was copied from this link: http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20100222/NEWS01/2220325/Teen+taught++learned+in+Kabul
When Robin Comisar returned Jan. 30 from Afghanistan he was, in a word, changed.
The 21-year-old Terrace Park man spent a month in Kabul, volunteering for a program that teaches English and skateboarding to the Afghan youth.
He woke up to the sound of rocket fire and saw an ambulance explode during one of the many attacks on the city. But he also made new friends - and said the experience was well worth it.
"It was the most meaningful thing I've done so far in terms of humanitarian work," said Comisar, a 2006 graduate of Mariemont High School who is currently a senior at Oberlin College. "It was intense. It was a lot of work. It wasn't necessarily safe a lot of the time."
Would he go back? Eventually, yes.
"I feel comfortable enough to go back," he said. "There's till a lot of work to be done."
Waking Up To Rockets
Comisar volunteered for Skateistan, the only skateboarding school in Afghanistan. The 3 year-old non-profit program uses skateboarding, which was just recently introduced in that country, as a tool to promote confidence, teambuilding and education for youth who otherwise might not get those lessons. It just opened the country's first indoor skate park/school in September.
Comisar, an avid skateboarder, had previously done work for the program's Web site and decided to volunteer as a teacher. He didn't know what to expect. The trip turned out to be everything good and bad that he had imagined humanitarian work in a war-torn country might be.
The project was amazing, he said. But the area wasn't safe. Bombings occurred about twice a week Kabul, Comisar said.
"It was pretty commonplace," he said. "The Taliban would shoot rockets from the hillside into town to various targets," he said. "So you'd wake up to the sound of rockets every so often."
One attack on Jan. 18, was particularly intense. Comisar went up to the roof of his building to look over the city, believing an earlier attack was over. Suddenly an ambulance exploded in a market about a half a kilometer away.
"Watching a massive attack on TV is different than seeing one in person," he wrote on his blog that day.
Comisar and his roommates holed up in the basement until the gunfire ceased. According to news reports, two civilians, three security personnel and seven attackers were killed and 71 people were wounded in the day-long attack.
Comisar eventually got used to the situation -at least as used to it as one can get.
"The first week or so you're terrified," he said. "I got used to it and you slip into survival mode. I just accepted what was going on as reality and acted accordingly until I went home."
A 'Rite Of Passage'
In between those types of nerve-fraying incidents, were plenty of good moments and big accomplishments that made the entire experience worthwhile.
Comisar wrote weeks-worth of curriculum for the budding Stateistan program that may guide future classes for years. He wrote policy documents on what to do when student miss school because they were arrested for begging or because of lockdowns in their neighborhood (both of those things happened). He also wrote safety policies.
"I worked pretty much around the clock," said Comisar. "My impact on the organization was significant and this was the first time the kids had been exposed to foreigners teaching so my bond was very strong."
Some curriculum involved social acceptance. The students segregated themselves by socioeconomic class. The rich kids wouldn't sit with the working kids. So Comisar led games that grouped poor and rich kids together to teach them that it was OK to interact with each other.
The students loved learning skateboard tricks from Comisar, who started skateboarding in the sixth grade. Many of the girls cried when they learned he was leaving.
Comisar was impressed by the students' tenacity and fearlessness on the course. He'd track some of the funnier stories on his blog. Like the time the class all hid their helmets to try to get out of wearing them or the girl who insisted on wearing huge strawberry-shaped barrettes in her hair underneath her helmet.
Comisar and his roommates also made some time for some sightseeing. They watched the sun set over the Afghan mountains, went on a tour another part of the city that had been hit hard by years of war and saw the bombed-out shell of the old presidential palace. He hiked a mountain and went for a jog in the Olympic stadium, which is next to the skate park.
He blogged about his experience, though admitted he watered down the parts about the attacks to avoid horrifying his parents. Comisar met with a mentor after he returned who remarked that Comisar looked different, like he "went through a rite of passage," Comisar said.
Comisar didn't disagree.
"It was intense," he said, "but worth it."
No comments:
Post a Comment