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How Do You Say 'Gnarly' In Amharic? Ethiopia Gets Its First Skate Park

Henok launches off a homemade quarterpipe ramp at a parking lot.
Sean Stromsoe
Henok launches off a homemade quarterpipe ramp at a parking lot.

In 2010, 12-year-old Nathan Eyasu became one of the first skateboarders in Ethiopia.

He bought an old board off a guy on the street for a dollar, learned some tricks off YouTube, and proceeded to shock his neighbors like Marty McFly in Back to The Future.

"They'd be like, 'Is there a magnet in there?' " Eyasu says, laughing. "Nobody knew what skateboarding is."

Today, he has plenty of company. In April, Ethiopia opened its first skateboard park, on the grounds of a government youth center in Addis Ababa, where Eyasu lives. The country is hoping to one day take its share of the $5 billion skateboard industry.

But for Sean Stromsoe, a 22-year-old photographer from California, the park is also a return to skateboarding's roots.

In 2013, Stromsoe came to Ethiopia on assignment and ran into Eyasu and his friends.

Eyob and the crew at a miniramp session. This ramp was destroyed to make space for the new Addis Skatepark.
/ Sean Stromsoe
/
Sean Stromsoe
Eyob and the crew at a miniramp session. This ramp was destroyed to make space for the new Addis Skatepark.

"It was just 20 kids that were sharing, I think five boards?" Stromsoe recalls. He felt as if he was looking back in time — to an era when skateboarding wasn't as commercialized and competitive as it is today.

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Click here to subscribe to our weekly global health and development email.

Watching these Ethiopian skaters, he says, "the thing I noticed was there wasn't so much judgment. Like some kid will be doing a handstand on the skateboard and everyone will be cheering and the next kid is going to do a tre-flip."

For nonskaters, a tre-flip looks like this, and it's a core move in street skating.

A handstand is one of a different category of tricks called freestyle.

In America each style and substyle has its own devotees and defenders. Whereas in Ethiopia, Stromsoe says, skateboarding felt more communal and fun, "like maybe 40 years ago [in the U.S.]. You don't see that so much back home. Because skateboarding has become pretty serious."

Stromsoe is still based in California but visits Ethiopia regularly. He co-founded a nonprofit — Ethiopia Skate — that raised money for new boards. With the help of Make Life Skate Life, another NGO that helps build concrete skate parks around the world, they built the first one in Addis Ababa.

The skate park opened in April.
/ Sean Stromsoe
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Sean Stromsoe
The skate park opened in April.

The skate park will protect young skaters from collisions with cars (Ethiopia has one of the highest road fatality rates in the world). But there's more to it than that. Eyasu says that it allows young Ethiopians to experience a "clean mentality" and aspire to potential future income. "We're trying to keep them spending their time on skateboarding rather than doing other things," he says. Among the skaters are former thieves and street boys.

I also meet Feven Birhana standing next to her SUV, a mother watching her 8-year-old, Abel.

He's easy to spot — the only kid in the park wearing a helmet and knee pads. "It's only his third day doing skating!" she says.

In a country poised for skateboarding firsts, she's part of the mix: Ethiopia's first skate mom.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Corrected: June 13, 2016 at 12:00 AM EDT
A previous version of this story misspelled Nathan Eyasu's last name as Eyuso.
Gregory Warner is the host of NPR's Rough Translation, a podcast about how things we're talking about in the United States are being talked about in some other part of the world. Whether interviewing a Ukrainian debunker of Russian fake news, a Japanese apology broker navigating different cultural meanings of the word "sorry," or a German dating coach helping a Syrian refugee find love, Warner's storytelling approach takes us out of our echo chambers and leads us to question the way we talk about the world. Rough Translation has received the Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club and a Scripps Howard Award.