Awista Ayub
Autor de However Tall the Mountain: A Dream, Eight Girls, and a Journey Home
Sobre El Autor
Awista Ayub was born in Afghanistan and immigrated to the United States in 1981. She founded the Afghan Youth Sports Exchange and served as the Education and Health Officer at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C.
Créditos de la imagen: Awista Ayub at United Nations' Young Changemakers Conclave 2012 By BollywoodHungama - BollywoodHungama, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19140378
Obras de Awista Ayub
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Género
- female
Miembros
Reseñas
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 2
- Miembros
- 94
- Popularidad
- #199,202
- Valoración
- 3.2
- Reseñas
- 5
- ISBNs
- 6
- Idiomas
- 3
Part of the story is about the intensive, six-week long training camp organized for the team of novice players in the US. The narrator describes their impressions of America and their increasing self-confidence on the field. They don't win many games, but they gain skills and expertise that make them the finest female soccer players in Afghanistan by the time they return home.
Spliced in with the narrator's account of the training camp are the stories of individual girls in the year following their trip. Most of these personal accounts are bittersweet - one of the girls goes into a severe depression because she misses the excitement and variety of her trip, and has a hard time pulling out of it. One girl betrays the others, and joins another team - her new coach wants her to invite all the girls who trained in America, but she doesn't. She wants the glory for herself. One faces extreme disapproval from her family, who don't have a problem with a girl playing soccer so much as they refuse her the right to her own pleasures, goals, or accomplishments - the head of the family, her older brother, tells her, "It is enough that you are going to school...That's all for you."
In the last third of the memoir, the narrator visits Afghanistan and tries to give a broader perspective on the role of sports, and women's team sports, in the country. She interviews a politician who won a spot in parliament, but whose only previous experience was on the national basketball team. She talks to the men who organize national sport's leagues in Afghanistan, and probes the reasons why they choose - or don't choose - to sponser women's teams. She argues that being able to play a sport, and in particular a men's sport, builds the pride and self-confidence that she thinks is key to righting women's place in Afghanistan and an important part of building a peaceful country.
HOWEVER TALL THE MOUNTAIN is short and airy, more like an hors d'oeuvre than a main course. I felt pretty neutral about it on the whole, often charmed but never riveted or deeply engaged.… (más)