Counting

On January 1st this year, I wrote, "I refrain from counting my steps. I don't need a machine to tell me when I've had enough exercise." At the moment, however, I am counting the kilometres I cover per week after all, because I joined a team of women who are virtually walking to Kabul. We are talking about this in order to raise awareness of the plight of Afghan women who feel their hard-won rights are imperilled by the recent resurgence of militant fundamentalists in their country and by the demands made by Taliban delegates at the recent peace talks in Doha. There are widespread fears that, in spite of their ambitions to influence future developments in Afghan society, Afghan girls might once again, as at the start of the 21st century, be forcefully prevented from attending high school, from learning to read books other than the Qur'an, from wearing clothes other than the burqa, from refusing to get married at a very young age, from engaging in sports or making music in public, and so forth.

The most disturbing indications that this is a possibility are the recent murderous attacks on prominent Afghan women who have been advocating for equal rights or acting as reporters; it is alleged that the Taliban has a hit list for assassinations, and that some of the women we personally know are on that list.

As of yesterday, we University Women Helping Afghan Women (UWHAW) and friends had covered enough kilometres between us, starting in Ottawa, to have reached Amsterdam. This entailed some magical walking on water as we crossed the Atlantic last week. We virtually walked through the major cities in eastern Canada — Montreal, Quebec, Halifax, St. John's — reaching each of these at the weekends, strangely enough, and are now starting to head across Europe. Jill Moll, the organiser, is keeping track of where we are. The last I heard (yesterday), we had 4921 km behind us. In reality we're all just strolling or cycling round the block in our neighbourhoods, or doing our shopping on foot, or skiing in the parks, or even covering some distance on exercise machines (a doubly virtual activity!) but so many people are participating that it quickly adds up. We are allowed to count our families' mileage / kilometrage(?) too, so I have added the approximately 20 km that Chris puts beneath his feet on the treadmill to our weekly totals. In my case, for the last three weeks, my daily kilometres have so far ranged from 2.5 to 12; my average seems to be about 6 km a day, ~8000 steps.

On March 18th some of us "stood on a bridge" (in this case the Flora MacDonald footbridge) as an obligatory part of the Walk to Kabul challenge, along with a CTV camera man who brought the footage back to his studio. CTV-Ottawa showed us on the news that evening, wearing masks, holding up our banners, flags and placards, and then walking on, as a group. One of us, Leslie Baird, stood back to take photos of the photographer, like this one, on the right. Below is a screenshot from the TV clip, with me holding the RIGHTS poster.