I See You, a mural against corruption.
ARTWARLORDS
T
Thirty minutes into our conversation
Omaid Sharifi puts me on hold.
“I’m sorry, my dad is calling. Just a
moment.”
Omaid is the co-founder of Artlords, a
social and human rights movement that
uses art, graffiti in particular, to bring about
change in Afghanistan.
After a moment he is back online.
“American University of Afghanistan was
attacked. Terrorists… some attackers are inside. All my friends are at the university. One
of my friends is injured, so it’s a very tense
situation right now. Can you do this later?”
Of course this conversation can wait.
“He’s stuck inside a classroom,” he says of
his friend. “I have to find a way to reach him.
Please, please we will talk later.”
And then he’s gone.
8 | JOURNEY OF HOPE
by Hannah White
Just two minutes earlier Omaid had been
telling me how dangerous life can be for an
activist in Afghanistan. Even painting a wall
can be risky.
“We don’t announce our paintings beforehand because I am a bit afraid the insurgents
and the terrorists are following us and sometimes they might do something or target us.”
Despite the risks, Omaid doesn’t want
that to overshadow all the good things that
are happening in Afghanistan.
“There has always been stories of explosions, drugs, killings, and a lot of failures…
We have serious problems… We understand
that. But at the same time, we are living. I
think it is something like 30 million people living in this country. We are surviving
somehow, and we are resilient,” Omaid said.
And over the last two years, Omaid and
the nine-person team working with him
at Artlords have proven just how resilient
they are.
In this short amount of time, Artlords has
changed the face of grassroots activism in
the country.
PACIFYING BLAST WALLS AND
ENDING CORRUPTION
“So it’s two years old,” Omaid says of his
organization. “We like to call it a movement… We started first, our motive was to
bring down these ugly blast walls.”
The thick, dust-colored blast walls line
most streets in Kabul these days, giving the
impression that the city is a veritable fortress. Most institutions — from government
agencies, to foreign embassies, to international NGOs, to private sector businesses
CENTRAL ASIA INSTITUTE