2005: Charlie Davis, future founder of SkatePal, had been enchanted by his parents stories of their trips to Israel and Palestine in the 80s. His mother, who worked for an Edinburgh church with charitable connections to a centre in Jenin, became the initial point of connect for Charlie’s first visit to the country he would soon call his second home. Like so many journeys, it was the choice to bring his board which catalysed everything that followed.
FEATURE IMAGE: EMIL AGERSKOV
How was that first trip to Palestine?
There is not a whole lot in common between Scotland and Palestine so there was quite a culture shock! It was obviously most pronounced on that first trip in 2006 as I had never been to the Middle East before and didn’t have any knowledge of Arabic.
Did you enjoy that experience?
I think that was my favourite trip as it was just an overload of new stimuli, and having to get by in a fairly small town with very limited language skills was exciting. The initial reason that I liked Palestine so much was because it was so different to Scotland; I had never been somewhere with such a culture difference. That is still the case today.
Did you have to reinvent yourself?
I wouldn’t say that, but the way you interact with people changes when you are in a very different culture as it would anywhere. The more time I spend in Palestine, the more I learn about how things work and about how people communicate between themselves and between various levels of authority.
So you develop your own routines outside of work?
Yeah. I hit up the falafel, hummus and salad bars everyday when I am there – followed by shisha of course! Some of the best times in Palestine for me though, is just sitting on the bus rides looking at the landscape. You very quickly reach the desert down towards Jericho, coming from the very fertile west of the country. Much has not changed or been developed over the millennia, and this is one of my favourite things about Palestine.
How did skateboarding fit into that
experience?
Well, that’s actually the great thing about skating: when you are hanging out with Palestinian skaters you have that one thing in common, which is enough to break down any other barriers that might impede communication otherwise. When I saw people’s excitement at my having brought a skateboard, I knew something was possible there.
But how did Charlie Davis go from culture shock to starting SkatePal?
There was quite a gap between that first trip in 2006 and setting up SkatePal in 2013, this was even before Skateistan had got going, so I didn’t formulate any plan of setting up a project until a few years later. I had maybe been to Palestine about seven times before I established SkatePal, and over those years I had got to know the place, the culture and the language. I think that without that knowledge it would have been almost impossible to have set it up.
2012: Charlie, now finished with a degree in Arabic, commits himself to his idea of a skateboarding project in Palestine. Unsure of where to start, he begins contacting cultural centres around the country looking for willing venues who wouldn’t mind them building some obstacles. The Sharek Youth Forum in Ramallah were quick to confirm, and summer of 2013 Charlie, his brother and two more volunteers were off to teach an 8-week course on a self-built mini-ramp.
When setting up a charity like this as a director, there must be a lot of pressure for you not to throw in the towel from exhaustion.
Without doubt there can be a lot of pressure, and more so in the initial few years when I was leading it alone. After Theo Krish joined the team in 2015, it was great to be able to share the responsibility and the workload between us. It has been down to our fantastic group of enthusiastic volunteers that all of our projects have continued to be successful, and without them we would never have been able to accomplish so much. Even so, there are so many specific cultural aspects to working in Palestine; language, local contacts, understanding of how local business works, etc. that it is often difficult to delegate the work away, and taking a proper holiday from SkatePal isn’t easy. We do not, however, have a shortage of people wanting to help out, and we are managing to delegate more and more as we move forward.
Does your work ever feel dangerous due to where you are based?
Being an international in Palestine, you never feel threatened. There have been very few occasions where I have felt in danger during the 10 years of visiting and working in Palestine. The occupation affects all those with whom we work locally, and of course sometimes the occupation does affect our work, but most notably in the difficulty of getting skate equipment into the country.
2014: Charlie and a larger team head out to Palestine to build the first SkatePal organised concrete skatepark, in Zebabdeh, Jenin. This was the keystone to their exposure, and gained them a lot of local and international support to grow the project and recruit Theo and a team of dedicated volunteers.
I’d like to know a bit about your skate-park construction projects. How did you get into all that business?
At the outset of SkatePal I hadn’t envisaged building a concrete skatepark. The first ramp we built was a 4-ft mini-ramp, along with a grind box, manual pad, etc. We just followed DIY plans we found online and it wasn’t as difficult as I had anticipated. But I began to get emails from various people following the initial build and skate camp in Ramallah, and we ended up building a concrete park in Zebabdeh, a village in the north of the West Bank the following year. We had a mixture of architects, skaters, and Arabic-speaking volunteers, and despite our limited experience, we managed to build a 250-m2 skatepark.
And that was that?
Things snowballed, and for our subsequent build in Asira we were able to draw on a much larger pool of volunteers many of whom had had experience in skatepark construction. The process began to get easier and the finish became smoother. We also expanded the scale of the plan from 250-m2 to 600-m2.
So what does a SkatePal build look like today?
During our most recent build in Jayyous, we had a very experienced team of volunteers, almost all of whom had had quite a bit of skatepark construction and had already been with us in Palestine before at some point. We sourced all our materials locally and employed local tradesman for a few of the specialised jobs which needed specific tools. Aside from the logistics of actually designing and building the park, which of course is a lot of planning, there was fairly limited red tape in terms of planning permission. In Jayyous, for example, our local partners, SkateQilya, persuaded the council that a skatepark would be very beneficial for the village and, after they had agreed, they signed the contract allowing us to build. Funnily enough, this process would have taken far, far longer if it were happening in Scotland!
Today: SkatePal is one of the most important skate-aid projects in the world. Charlie and Theo have since teamed up with Isle Skateboards to produce their own line of SkatePal boards and this year the official 5-Year-Anniversary magazine was produced, which documents the SkatePal story. Steadily constructing new skateparks around Palestine, the heart of their operation is still organising tuition, equipment supply and cultural-events for young men and women’s enjoyment and empowerment.
Tell us about the gender divide in Palestinian skateboarding.
One of the best things about growing a skate scene from its infancy is that there is no cultural baggage associated with it. We have therefore managed to introduce skateboarding as a gender-neutral sport, something which has been helped by the number of female volunteers who have come out to teach. We have seen a great response from the girls in the towns and villages in which we have worked.
Did the local parents and authorities respond as openly?
Initially, various local groups were skeptical as to whether boys and girls would skate together and whether their families would accept it, but for the Palestinians, skateboarding inhabits a space between sport and hobby and as such has been widely accepted as something both girls and boys can do and, more importantly, something they can do together. At our skateparks we have a roughly 60/40 split between boys and girls respectively, which is much higher than most skateparks back home.
“One of the best things about growing a skate scene from its infancy is that there is no cultural baggage associated with it.”
Do you believe a skate scene built from its infancy can ever develop the edgy culture around it that skateboarding in the West has? Furthermore, does that matter?
I think that amongst the older Palestinian skaters, skating does have that edgy culture that you mention. They are aware of the global skate scene and how it is viewed back in the US or UK, for example. The main difference is that the kids are getting into skating while their parents are there encouraging them and hanging out as well. Because there is a more family vibe at the parks in Palestine than in other places, skateboarding might not develop the same counter-culture image that we are familiar with but, as you say, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If it means that skateboarding is accepted and taken up more widely because it has a more family friendly vibe then that can only be good.
Is there something negative about skateboarding in the West that you’ve noticed as a result of growing a scene from infancy?
[Laughs] I don’t think skateboarding has anything negative in-and-of-itself. Nevertheless, there definitely is something refreshing when you look at a new skateboard scene somewhere as it is devoid of cliques and fashions. It is just kids having fun on a skateboard – kids who participate fully in all cultural and social areas of life in Palestine. Some skate scenes within the Western culture of skateboarding can be exclusive, so I suppose one thing we can learn is that skating doesn’t have to be so, but can exist in a more socially accepted manner.
And is there something positive you’ve noticed in the same regard?
The most hopeful thing I see, especially coming from SkatePal’s perspective, is the proliferation of projects and groups across the world who aim to use skateboarding to support underprivileged children. It is fantastic to see skateboarding involved in such a constructive way and it shows no signs of slowing down. This exemplifies what all skaters love about the social side of skateboarding – It brings people together despite any barriers that might have separated them otherwise.
The Future: SkatePal, having celebrated 5-years of incredible growth, are looking ahead to their ten year goal: establishing a self-sustaining local scene, supporting other international aid organisations and taking the SkatePal models to other countries in the hope of repeating the same skate-fuelled-empowerment there.
How will you make moves towards your ten year goal of supporting other projects?
We have already been advising several people on how to set up organisations like SkatePal, mostly in Palestine, but in other areas too. As we gradually pull out as a physical presence in Palestine we would like to be working closely with these other groups, and further assisting them, as well as continuing our support of the skate scene in Palestine. In the coming years, we will be investigating where we could be most effective and where there are similar communities who would benefit greatly from what we could offer. As we explore the options, we will be getting in touch with local organisations working there to see with whom we could implement our projects in a sustainable way.
There is an influx of skate-aid projects these days. Why?
I think the influx of skate projects like this shows that skateboarding is at the stage where it is growing steadily. In the age of online crowdfunding and social media, it has become easier to gain exposure and fundraise for skate projects, allowing more people to undertake them.
What sort of advice can you give to somebody with such an idea in mind, wanting to put it into practice?
My advice would be that it is a lot of work but it is definitely something worth doing. As mentioned before, I have been helping out a few individuals and groups who been asking how to set up an NGO and what it all means in terms of paperwork, etc. It is important to know exactly what you are planning to do, how you are intending to carry it out, and how you envisage it becoming something sustainable. If you are at the early stages of planning something, it is useful to get in touch with other NGOs/groups who are doing something similar in the area to see how you can collaborate with them. Spread the love!
Is the Palestinian scene at that point now then where home-grown projects are springing up?
The non-profit who we partnered with for the Jayyous project, SkateQilya, is based in Palestine and responds to the groups of bladers, skaters and free-runners from the Qalqilya area. We would like to see more local groups like this emerge to foster a new generations of skaters in the country. At the moment we are also supplying equipment for skate classes at a local youth centre in Ramallah. The classes were set up by former volunteer and local skater Abdullah. Two of our first local volunteers Aram and Adham will be back in Palestine during their holidays from uni, and will be involved in more classes as well.
Who specifically would you like to thank for helping SkatePal in the last five years?
I’m sure I would leave out someone if I were to thank everyone individually who has helped us over the past 5 years, as there have been so many! But I would like to say thanks to everyone who has come out to Palestine to volunteer with us and has given their time, money and effort, and also all those who have held fundraising events in their home towns to help us finance out projects. A special thanks to those who have been working with SkatePal on a more regular basis over the past few years: Theo, Phil, Maen, Chris, Dani, Jon, and Christian. Everyone else, you know who you are, and we really appreciate all your support!
