Not many people divide their time between the BC coast and Kabul, Afghanistan, but human rights activist Lauryn Oates does just that. When the Vancouverite was 14, an article she read about Taliban cruelties inspired her to respond to the what she saw as a lack of action from the western world.
She was horrified that civilized countries were making excuses for the unforgivable actions in the east and couldn’t understand why they would turn their backs on women and children in Afghanistan when they were no different from herself. Now that she’s older, she sees that physical proximity plays a role.
“We distance ourselves with people in places like Afghanistan, where it’s easy for us to do that, because Afghanistan is literally on the opposite side of the planet from Victoria; you cannot get farther away,” she observes (during an interview from Afghanistan). “We really exoticize people the further they are away from us when we should be focusing more on our similarities.”
The distance still acts as a barrier, it seems. Now, years after the Taliban fell out of power, Oates assumes most people still don’t understand the impact the terrorist group had on the country. She was stunned when she saw the statistics on infant and child mortality rates.
“Everywhere in the world the human development indicators are slowly, gradually improving,” she explains. “The trend is that they’re on this upward climb. In Afghanistan, you see this slow upward climb and then this plummet exactly during the period of the Taliban, and then it recovers again as soon as the Taliban are out of power.”
Oates recognizes the problem also comes from what she sees as misleading media reports about the situation overseas.
“The real tragedy has been the warped narrative in Afghanistan that nothing’s going well. I see headlines that say ‘Women’s situation is as bad as it was during the Taliban,’ and ‘Nothing’s changed,’ but that is absolute garbage,” she says. “This is a completely different country than it was when I first started coming here.”
Oates hopes to bring awareness and thought to this year’s TEDxVictoria. She wants to close the gap of communication and make people start thinking about our global community. This is what TED events claim to do: give activists like Lauryn Oates a chance to motivate the people.
“We need to do a better job of listening to the voices in countries like Afghanistan rather than speaking for them and making assumptions about them,” she stresses. “I think if you actually talk to Afghans or Arabians or people in Libya or any of the countries that are struggling to get a functional democracy in place, you learn that people just want the same things that we want.”
TEDx Victoria
Saturday, November 22
$89 and up, McPherson Playhouse
tedxvictoria.com