I’d made three different visits at that point. I had been looking at situations for women in rural and urban areas. There’s such diversity of women who are activists and politicians in urban areas and women who live in rural areas. But the one constant was women can’t bike. There was a women’s boxing team, Tae Kwan Do, girls are playing cricket, there’s a girls soccer team. But I never saw girls riding no matter where I was, despite bikes being everywhere. Boys and men ride them everywhere as transportation. I also realized after the first three or four visits that as a foreign woman I was considered an honorary man. That meant that I was considered equal to men. I was allowed to get away with a lot more than perhaps an Afghan woman would. You’re essentially this neutral gender.

As a mountain biker, there were several things that nudged me to ride. For one, the country is just incredibly beautiful and I wanted to explore it on two wheels. Also I could raise these questions around why girls can’t ride bikes if I am riding a bike. I’d hoped curiosity would start these conversations and that’s exactly what happened and why I continued to ride.

Every place that I ever rode a bike–and I rode my bike over a dozen or more trips in different areas of the country–the bike became this incredible ice breaker. It allowed me to have very organic conversations on the side of the road or off a goat path with Afghan men about the work I was doing, about sports, about whether or not women can ride in their community and why.