what’s shakin’

Hello, Ollie

While college graduates are scrambling for lackluster desk jobs or settling for internships, one from Syracuse University has landed the job of his dreams. Days after earning a master’s in media studies from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Brandon Gomez, 24, started working for a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Kabul, Afghanistan, which has skateboarding at the heart of its curriculum.

For the first six months Gomez will be a volunteer for Skateistan, helping with many clerical and logistical aspects of the company’s general operations. That includes instructing local youth in the skate park Skateistan constructed in Kabul. Provided he is successful there, Gomez will be hired as an executive assistant to the director of the program and stay an additional six months.

Skateistan is a school for Afghan youth that was established in 2007 by Australian skateboarders. The organization hosts international volunteers who teach art classes, environmental issues courses and skateboarding to more than 300 students ages 5 through 17. Teachers seek to empower students through creative and analytical coursework. Girls ages 14 to 19 can take a journalism course which teaches them the trade of a 21st-century reporter. For a final project the girls produce a magazine about issues in Afghanistan that reaches 10,000 readers in the country.

Rhianon Bader, media and communications director for Skateistan, revealed the NGO’s plans for expansion. Skateistan partnered with a European NGO to construct a similar facility to Skateistan in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

“We’re really excited about the Cambodia partnership, which has built momentum superquickly,” Bader said. Another Skateistan project is in its infant stages in Pakistan, and a second skate facility in Mazar-e-Sharif, Northern Afghanistan is in the planning stages as well.

Afghanistan probably wouldn’t top most people’s list of places to do service. Reactions to the raid on Osama bin Laden were mixed among Afghans since the Taliban is part of the fabric of the population. The Asian nation is the third most corrupt country on the globe, according to Transparency International. It can be dangerous, too. In April 11, people were killed in Mazar-e Sharif including seven United Nations workers in protests following an American pastor’s decision to publicly burn a copy of the Qur’an.

Gomez is on alert. “I’m a little bit nervous about being in Afghanistan, but after speak-ing with the staff in Skateistan, it’s more of a good nervous,” he said. “I’m not worried about my well-being or safety so much as adjusting to the culture and the culture shock I might experience.”

Gomez has been practicing skateboarding for 11 years and his master’s thesis is centered on marketing the sport. Upon moving here, Gomez quickly integrated into the Syracuse skate scene. In October he and other local skateboarders led an initiative to turn Ormond Spencer Park, 191 Walnut Ave., into a skate spot. Gomez helped morph a dilapidated tennis court into a skate park with homemade ramps and boxes. Last fall the park saw a few local competitions, and now that the weather has warmed clusters of skateboarders have returned.

Gomez, who averages at least an hour a day of skating when the weather is good, is really excited about empowering young people through his passion. “It’s hard not to take things for granted when you live in America,” Gomez said. “Those {Afghan} kids are fearless; it’s just a way for them to get their mind off of things which is much needed over there. In Afghanistan the youth make up a really large part of the population, and if you’re going to make a positive change in a place like that you have to start with the kids.”

Gomez grew up in Coatesville, Pa., a bluecollar city near Philadelphia. He received one of six McNair Fellowships allotted for SU. The fellowship is for academically promising students in financial need who are the first members of their family to go to college. “This is the first thing I’m really proud of in my life,” Gomez said, in addition to receiving the fellowship. “Skateboarding gave me confidence and a creative outlet, something positive to do with my time, and the fact that I get to do it now for others is pretty amazing.”

Gomez applied for the position with Skateistan in November as soon as he learned about it. The hipster fashion label Diesel produced the short documentary Skateistan: To Live and Skate Kabul that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (it’s now on YouTube) and it was the movie’s trailer which got Gomez all revved up.

He even enlisted the help of his brother Dave, 22, who was studying in Tokyo at the time, to secure the position. Dave by chance met Jason Pratt, a public affairs officer for the Afghan embassy in Tokyo, and put Pratt in touch with his brother. Then Gomez and Pratt began a long correspondence and Pratt eventually recommended Gomez personally to Skateistan.

Although Gomez applied in November he did not hear from Skateistan until March. Volunteer positions are for six months and he applied when the previous hiring period had just finished. But Bader said Gomez was immediately shortlisted once they had the chance to review applications.

“What was probably most impressive besides his unique mix of skateboarding, academic and teaching skills was that it was clear he’d done his research {about Skateistan and current Afghan events},” Bader said. “Coming to volunteer at Skateistan is much more intense than a regular internship, and it’s literally full-time, 24/7. You deal with the daily stresses of living in a country with security issues, plus you’re living and working with the same group of people, so the result is that you become like a family.

“This element, the familial bond that is formed in such an environment between international volunteers—as well as with local staff and kids—was noted by Brandon in his application, and we felt that was incredibly perceptive and a good sign.”

Kevin Poncelet, 25, who has skated with Gomez in Syracuse for a year, said this is a great opportunity for Gomez. “I think anybody who sticks with skating for as long as Brandon has does it because they really love it,” Poncelet said. “It’s not about whether or not their friends skate, or if it’s cool to skate anymore: It’s clearly something that Brandon just really needs in his life as an outlet; as a form of expression, it’s something that he genuinely enjoys.”

Gomez could not be happier to help empower young people through skating in a country distressed by war. “This is definitely the dream job for me,” said Gomez. “It’s every single thing I’ve been doing my whole life coming together.”

If you would like to support Skateistan, visit www.skateistan.org/donate.

—Lily Betjeman

Literary Launch Pad

Must be something in the water on West Genesee Street, because the Syracuse New Times has helped launch the career of another memoirist. First it was Syracuse University graduate, and 2001 New Times intern, Koren Zailckas, whose book Smashed (Penguin, 2005) provided a candid look at her drunken college career.

This time it’s a remembrance of a more healthy, but no less risky, pursuit, recorded in The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure (Bantam, New York City; 320 pages; $15/softcover). It’s author and former Manlius resident Rachel Friedman’s account of traveling solo in Ireland, Australia and South America. Friedman penned a few articles for this paper back in 2006. Friedman’s pursuit was risky from her parents’ point of view, and not just traveling solo as a young woman, but also by bucking the “good girl” label and taking 18 months away from college to do so.

A 1999 graduate of Manlius Pebble Hill School and 2003 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with an English degree, Friedman returns to her hometown on Friday, June 10, 7 p.m., to read from her book at Barnes & Noble, 3454 Erie Blvd. E., DeWitt. She’ll talk about visits to Ireland, Australia and ultimately South America.

“I tend to fall in love with the places where I visited,” she noted. “I loved in Ireland being part of the hostel culture, and sharing the other visitors’ adventures. In South American I learned how to be tough and self-reliant.” These are lessons Friedman believes she may not have learned had she followed the path that was expected of her, that of the “good girl.”

“The ‘good girl’ for me was someone who was a very diligent student, didn’t take a lot of risks, wanted to please parents and teachers, and so this story is one of figuring out who I want to be in the world outside of all those pressures and temptations,” said Friedman, 29, who now lives in Manhattan. “I have it figured out now, but like any truth it’s difficult to hold onto. It’s easy intellectually but difficult in practice.”

Friedman, who wrote several articles for The New Times about Syracusan-turned-Broadway actress Carrie Manolakos, decided to pen The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost after realizing that many young Americans do exactly what she decided not to do.

“One of the main reasons I wrote the book,” she said, “is because I feel very strongly about American youth taking advantage of the gap year between graduation from college to starting a career, using that period of time to travel to think about who they want to be. So many of us are on that trajectory from school to job to house—all the things we’re expected to do. It’s a rite of passage in other countries; we’re not quite there yet in the United States.”

Now married, continuing to write and teaching literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Friedman has another book in mind. “It’s about religious intermarriage and identity and what we owe our histories,” she said. “I’m not religious, but like many contemporary Jews I culturally identify with being Jewish and when we talked about whether to change my name and how we’re going to raise kids, I had to find out my official position on my identity, which I had taken for granted. It has become more of a conversation than I expected.”

You can participate in that conversation, and one about The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost, on Friday at Barnes & Noble. For more information, call 449-2948.

—Georgia Williams