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The Current Transcript for January 8, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE 1: She looks excited.

VOICE 2: I'm so excited because I love mess.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Of course, she's excited by mess. She's Marie Kondo, the lifestyle guru who has turned the dream of a decluttered closet into a juggernaut. It's a runaway success for Ms. Kondo. She's even got a Netflix series now and her message of only holding on to things that spark joy has clearly hit a nerve. In a society where we shop till we drop, where our acquisitions intersect with our anxieties, Marie Kondo's KonMari method is less about folding and more about feelings. Then again, a lot of other people are happy to bless the mess, arguing that clutter is the key to creativity. So where do you stand on that? Get your smartphone out of the sock pile and hear the debate in half an hour. Also today, when Khalida Popal started playing soccer in Afghanistan, the women who loved the game had to play in secret. She would go on to become the first captain of the Afghan women's soccer team and it would empower her and give her a voice. Now she's using that voice to demand justice for as many as 20 team members who say they've been sexually assaulted by male soccer officials.

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VOICE: Two male representatives were drunk and went into one of the player's room and tried to touch their body. We want to put pressure on FIFA to start the investigation.

AMT: Khalida Popal is my guest in an hour. But we're going to start in Vancouver, where today marks the start of a new way to confront opioid overdoses, offering a supervised place to get and take free uncontaminated drugs.

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VOICE: You don't have to hustle or you know hurt people or hurt yourself to get the drug that you need to basically survive day to day, right.

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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B.C. 'safe supply' pilot aims to help entrenched addicts avoid overdoses, says advocate

Guests: Rafferty Baker, Donald MacPherson

AMT: If Canada's opioid crisis hasn't touched you or hasn't touched you yet, then it can be hard to fathom the scope of what is happening, but the numbers speak for themselves. More than 9000 Canadians have died of opioid overdoses in the past two years alone. And it's an epidemic that will not be eradicated any time soon, which is why some people on the frontlines, advocates and health officials are turning to the idea of a so-called safe supply of drugs to ease the crisis. The idea is to provide safe free opioids to people who are already addicted. People such as Carissa Sutherland.

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VOICE: 2008 is when I started using and I've had clean time, but it's a hard battle. When I first started doing drugs, I started with morphine and then I went from that to heroin and then crystal meth as well. So it kind of just progressed more and more.

AMT: So as of today, 50 so-called entrenched drug users in Vancouver will begin receiving doctor prescribed opioids. The CBC's Rafferty Baker went to the facility where they get them. Rafferty joins me now from Vancouver. Hi.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Hi, Anna Maria.

AMT: Where is this happening?

RB: It's at a clinic in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. It's run by the Portland Hotel Society, a group that operates many of the social services in the neighborhood. I visited last week as they were putting the final details of the program together. They've got a nurses booth to dispense drugs, tables full of medical supplies and stainless steel tables, stations for people to inject. Now the location is almost exactly at Main and Hastings. If you've ever been there, you'll know it's essentially the center of the Downtown Eastside. Most of the time there will be dozens of people milling around the intersection, some suddenly selling drugs or cigarettes and many others looking a little dazed or searching for a fix to ward off withdrawal. It can feel like an entirely different country, even though it's just blocks from downtown or the touristy Gastown area.

AMT: Yeah I've definitely been in that neighborhood. How's it going to work, Rafferty, what kind of drugs will they give out?

RB: There will be 50 participants, all people with addiction who have tried other ways to get off the drugs like methodone or suboxone. They're all people who already use the overdose prevention site where this is taking place and a doctor will prescribe Dilaudid pills. That's the brand name for oral hydromorphone, an opioid, and participants can get up to five doses a day. Sarah Foster is the nurse manager of the program and walks me through how it works.

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VOICE: So the patient would come in, the nurse would do a quick assessment with them and then they would check their order, pour their meds and then hand them off to the mental health worker and the mental health worker would crush them and create the slurry and pass them off to the patient. The patient can take it injected or if they choose to take it orally, they also can. The whole point of this program is to offer a continuum of care for people that are at different sort of levels. So our hope is that people will move along the continuum to less harmful use practices, but basically we're trying to meet people where they're at. So they might start injecting it, maybe they decide to eventually start taking it orally. That is sort of the hope.

AMT: So Rafferty, you mentioned these pills are Dilaudid, why is that the drug that's been given out?

RB: It's something they've learned directly from street users. It's interesting, people suffering from an opioid addiction will get some relief from withdrawal from anything that binds with the brain's opioid receptors and Dilaudid definitely does that. It's something that has been available from the legal pharmaceutical world, commonly used for pain relief after things like surgery. It's always possible to divert and abuse it thought. When a more hard drug user turns to Dilaudid, he or she will often find more immediate results if it's injected and it's a bit stronger. Basically it's able to get to the brain without passing through the liver, as it would if it were taken as a pill.

AMT: How easy is it to get on the street?

RB: Well here's the thing, you can get it, but it's not cheap. If you buy the pills on the street, you're going to pay $20, maybe $30 dollars. When you buy it legally, like the clinic is going to for this, the pills cost 36 cents each.

AMT: Twenty dollars a pill versus 36 cents.

RB: Yeah, it's huge, especially for someone like Carissa Sutherland, we heard her in the introduction there. She's a user who also works at the Portland Hotel Society or PHS is a peer support worker and she hopes to be part of the program. She says users who buys Dilaudid, as she has, or Dilly she calls it, when they buy it on the street, they can pick it up four or five times a day and each pick up can include at least two or three pills. So the price and daily quantity can range, but we're talking about something like $80 to $300-$400 a day.

AMT: What would this program mean to her then?

RB: It's interesting, when you ask organizers and health officials what a safe supply is, you'll probably get an answer about drug contamination, fentanyl, toxicity, overdoses, that sort of thing. But listen to what Carissa says when I ask her about the idea of getting a safe supply.

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VOICE: You don't have to hustle or don't have to hurt people or hurt yourself to get the drug that you need to basically survive like day to day or hour to hour or minute to minute even. I'm hoping like once I get on the Dilly, Dilaudid program sorry, that I won't have to do that. I won't have like go boost from stores or steal from stores or you know sell things or like you know to get money to get drugs and then I'll be able to just use that solely or like at least for the most part.

AMT: So it's not just about getting safe drugs, it's' about making the way she lives her life safer, she talks, she obviously doesn't want to turn to crime.

RB: Yeah exactly. A lot of people were talking about in this program have to turn to pretty undesirable ways to get enough money to support the habit. Take Julian for example. He's signing up to get into the program. Julian is a 29-year-old who was injecting fentanyl or "down" is it's often known in the neighborhood. He just got out of jail when I met him and just a warning here, he does use some language that may be offensive to some listeners.

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VOICE: Well honestly I was city cells in jail since New Years eve till yesterday afternoon because I was shoplifting to get down. Not something I'm proud of, it's a terrible thing to do, but you know when you're desperate on the street, I didn't have like any criminal record up until I started using and now it's like grown. I've gotten like three charges in the past year as opposed to like zero up until then.

RB: And is it all kinda theft stuff?

VOICE: Yeah all theft unders. Theft under $5000.

RB: What will change about your life if you're able to get on this program?

VOICE: Well hopefully you know start making some changes like instead of going around you know trying to make money in illegal like shitty ways like that you know, maybe like get back into working, have an actual job. You know, maybe get back into a life.

RB: And personal safety is something Sarah Foster, the nurse manager thinks of as well.

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VOICE: Offering this to people allows people to not have to do like say super risky sex work, when they're really, really dope sick in the morning or not have to be crime to be able to buy the drugs that they need just to get by. And they don't necessarily want to do those things, but they're forced to because of their addiction.

AMT: This program is the first of its kind, but it's not the only place in Vancouver that provides injectable opioids, is it?

RB: No it's not and you only have to go a couple blocks to find a similar program. That one's called Crosstown clinic and for several years they've actually been prescribing medical grade heroin, as well as regular, as in non-pill form hydromorphone to about 130 patients.

AMT: So what's the difference? What sets these two programs apart?

RB: Certainly the new program is the only one using off label Dilaudid tablets, but there are other differences too. Both will offer what they call wraparound support, meaning they'll provide access to other social and health services that are part of, well it's all part of stabilizing patients lives and getting in a lot of the root causes of the addiction. But patients at the Crosstown clinic have a much more structured system. There are long term participants in the program. They have up to three scheduled several doses each day and at this new PHS program, they're calling it low barrier.

AMT: What does low barrier mean?

RB: That means people can drop in, drop out, if they spend time in jail or something, they won't have a problem continuing with the program. They also schedule their own doses, up to five a day, with at least an hour gap between injections. The catch phrase you hear down there is and you heard this from the nurse Sarah Foster, meeting them where they're at and here's Coco Culbertson. She's running the new PHS program.

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VOICE: This is treatment, but it also addresses safe supply. We care for people here. This is a place where people come to receive care and this tablet program is part of, is a tool for our tool box when we're trying to intervene and provide care for people who are totally street entrenched, mostly homeless, living in violent poverty. This is just one more thing we can add to our toolkit to try and offer some reduction of suffering in what's going on. If this program is successful, it will reduce the moral panic around offering legalized or decriminalized or safe supply for drug users across the country.

RB: So Culbertson and then others are hoping the Safe Supply program becomes a bit of a stepping stone to a major policy shift, when it comes to hard drugs like heroin.

AMT: And it all starts today?

RB: Exactly yeah, the first 50 patients.

AMT: OK. Rafferty, thank you.

RB: Thanks, Anna Maria.

AMT: Rafferty Baker, a CBC reporter, based in Vancouver. Well not everyone thinks Vancouver's new Safe Supply drug program is a good thing. Dr Jeremy Devine is a new physician in the psychiatry program at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

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VOICE: In Canada we've gone from providing safe injection sites and now we've kind of progressed to providing drugs directly to the patient. And I just wonder is this really helping the patient with addiction? And I get nervous with these Vancouver programs distributing opioids because that does reduce crime, that does have societal benefits. It is very inexpensive to keep a patient addicted on opioids and make sure that they don't cause any problems. And I just worry that's so cost effective, it sort of gets the job done per se in that these individuals are no longer a societal problem. At what cost? What has been lost? Am I going to keep you dependent on opioids for the rest of your life?

AMT: Dr. Jeremy Devine, a physician at McMaster University's psychiatry program. My next guest has been advocating for a safe supply of drugs for people with addictions for years. Donald MacPherson is the executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition at Simon Fraser University. He joins us from our Vancouver studio. Hi.

DONALD MACPHERSON: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: Before we talk about anything else, I'll just get you to respond to what Dr. Devine said there.

DM: Well it was interesting to hear him after listening to the people at the street level in Vancouver and it sounds like he hasn't left his ivory tower for some time or heard that 9000 people have died in the last couple of years. You can't provide health care services or addiction treatment services to people who aren't alive anymore. So I think the thrust of the program in Vancouver is just another logical extension of the supervised consumption sites that were implemented you know quite some time ago. I think it's 16-17 years ago now. So I really encourage health care providers, physicians, academics, universities to really think about the ethical considerations of consigning people to a toxic drug supply, just because it might challenge their view of good health care.

AMT: And what about the concern of getting people off long term addiction. Where does this fit in that or is that the goal?

DM: Well it's not the goal of this program, but it's a continuum and I think you heard the staff at the program say it's a continuum of care. And the whole thrust of harm reduction, whether it's supervised consumption, the Safe Supply program is to help people stabilize, stay alive, to live another day to perhaps move into different kinds of health services, should they choose to. So it's totally connected. To pretend that harm reduction services and safe supply programs are not connected to the broader health care system is just ridiculous.

AMT: And when you say should they choose to, do they choose to? What have you seen?

DM: Well absolutely they choose to. People choose to change all of the time, every day and we have to provide a multiple array of services for them, options for them to choose. People stop every day, they reduce their consumption every day. They change their consumption habits every day. It's a very diverse population of people who have issues with opioid user addictions. There are wonderful success stories every day. The tragedy is that we have not really addressed the supply problem yet and this program is remarkable in that it's beginning to say look the real problem we're facing here in Canada, not just Vancouver, in Alberta, in Ontario, is that the supply is so deadly, people are dying before they can make those changes.

AMT: The supply is contaminated.

DM: It's totally contaminated. Over 80 percent of overdoses in British Columbia are impacted by fentanyl. And fentanyl is a very powerful opioid, it's very difficult to dose, but yet it's used in hospitals everyday in a proper dose. So it's the tragedy is we spent so much time trying to fix this problem from the health side of it, we have neglected interventions like this that look at replacing the toxic supply with a legal, regulated substance that's not going to kill people when they come in to use it.

AMT: Now Health Canada is approving the free distribution of opioids to this small group. What is the significance of that?

DM: Well it's an innovation, it's yet another innovation, it's a small, but I hope seismic shift in the approach that's beginning to recognise that the urgency in dealing with the crisis in Canada is about the supply. And so you're seeing health authorities, you're seeing public health officials call for a regulated drug supply. You're seeing Health Canada support innovative programs like this. I think the urgency is around replacing the deadly supply and at the same time engaging people in health services. So we're on the right track as far as I'm concerned and our organization has been arguing that we need to end prohibition. Drug prohibition created this problem. Our public policy, our drug policy that we've supported for so many years, has created this problem. It's a totally predictable outcome from a failed policy of drug prohibition.

AMT: So does the fact that Health Canada is involved and it's approving this mean that we can see this used elsewhere in the country?

DM: That's the critical issue. So you heard Coco Culbertson talk about 50 people being engaged. Well if 9000 people died in the last couple of years in Canada, that means there's hundreds of thousands of people at risk because there's a lot of opioid users over there. So the issue is again treating this as an urgent situation, a poisoned drug supply and scaling up these kinds of programs as quickly as we can. So I hope this doesn't become a long you know 5 year research program. I hope this can be brought to communities that are losing people every day. Tonight people will be buying drugs all over British Columbia, all over Canada, and they're at severe risk of overdose. So we really need to act quickly.

AMT: And of course today, 50 people won't have to do that. They can use this facility.

DM: And that's remarkable. You heard the change in the lives of people that don't have to worry about doing sex work or shoplifting or hitting the street every morning trying to find a drug dealer that might have been arrested last night. I mean it's a remarkable approach in its sort of common sense and logic.

AMT: We've got a federal election campaign 10 months away. Do you think the opioid crisis is going to figure in the campaign?

DM: Well if 9000 people dying over the last couple of years isn't an election issue, I will be astounded. All parties need to work together on this. It's not a political issue. I hope it doesn't become a political issue. All parties need to work together to help solve this problem and we have some light at the end of the tunnel with these kinds of projects and whether you like them or not, they may work to help us get out of this situation.

AMT: And so what do you say to the politicians who are wary?

DM: What I say? I say look at look at the evidence. The evidence of prohibition is there are mountains of evidence that show that our current policy is a disaster, a catastrophic failure. There is lots of evidence to show that addiction treatment works, substitution treatment works, supervised consumption services work. I believe we'll be creating evidence that the safe supply program will work to help people. It can't be worse than the current situation of expecting our drug laws and enforcement to take care of this problem. So I encourage politicians of all stripes to really look at the evidence and try and help us implement the public health approach to this situation.

AMT: Donald MacPherson thanks for your time today.

DM: Thank you.

AMT: Donald MacPherson, executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition at Simon Fraser University. He joined us from our Vancouver studio. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us, the news is next. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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Marie Kondo's tidying method won't work everywhere, says author who believes in the power of mess

Guests: Ivanka Siolkowsky, Tim Harford

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come, Khalida Popal was a founding member and captain of Afghanistan's women's soccer team. Today she is a whistle blower about alleged sexual and physical abuse the players were exposed to from inside the organization. She will be my guest in half an hour to talk about their dashed World Cup dreams. But first, what's so neat about tidying up?

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VOICE 1: She looks excited.

VOICE 2: I'm so excited because I love mess.

VOICE 3: It's a never ending battle to fight the clutter.

VOICE 4: I want things to be more simple, I don't know how to fix it.

VOICE 3: With the baby coming, it's going to be more chaos.

[Sound of things falling]

VOICE 3: Oh my God, we have too much stuff.

AMT: Well there you go. If you are getting tired of looking at your own mess at home, you can switch on Netflix and check out other people's clutter. That is from the new series Tidying Up. And yes it features the global tidying up sensation, Marie Kondo. Each week, the Japanese organizing guru and best-selling author, visits a household where people are drowning in their stuff. And she uses her trademark techniques to help them pare down their possessions, holding on to only items that "spark joy." Her methods have sparked some skepticism and some backlash, but Marie Kondo clearly has her devotees and one of them is sitting across from me in our studio. Ivanka Siolkowsky is a professional organizer. Her company is called the Tidy Moose. She has been officially trained in Marie Kondo's methods and she's here now. Hello.

IVANKA SIOLKOWSKY: Hello. Thank you for having me this morning.

AMT: So people, not everyone's familiar with Marie Kondo's method. What makes it different from other approaches to organizing and decluttering?

IS: I would say one of the main differences is that a lot of people when they start decluttering they want to do it by room because they feel overwhelmed in a space, but with her method, she focuses on decluttering by category. So there are four main categories. There's clothing, then books and papers, those depending on how many, could be divided into two as well. Then what's called kimono, which is not outfit, not the kimono, but miscellaneous items, so things like sporting goods, garage, kitchen, all of those kind of fall into one area.

AMT: The cause of the greatest clutter.

IS: Yeah that's right. And then finally sentimental items and it's important to do it in that order because imagine if you started with sentimental items, you'd be done within 10 minutes because you'd be overwhelmed. So there's a certain reason that there's a build up towards that to the end.

AMT: And one of the main things she says is the objects you own should spark joy. What does that mean?

IS: Correct. It means that rather than thinking about when you're decluttering thinking about what to get rid of, we should be deciding what to keep. That alone just changes the mindset. So you're less overwhelmed and it's not so negative. So everything that's in your life should be there because it makes you happy. It gives you a feeling and her phrasing is spark joy. So you know when you go on a special vacation or something, we always pack our favorite items. Right? So why not keep only those types of items in our lives.

AMT: Yeah, but how does that work with potato peelers and thermal underwear?

IS: Thermal underwear, keep you warm, thereby sparking joy.

AMT: Okay, I'm with you. And when you discard possessions, she encourages you to thank them. Why?

IS: Correct because you want to become appreciative of the things you own and that will change how you move forward in your life. So thanking things either by saying you know those thermal underwear, thank you for keeping me warm in the winter. I no longer need you because I moved to Florida or whatever, versus just getting rid of it and not thinking about having those items and what they did for you in your life.

AMT: Why are you such an advocate?

IS: I think.

AMT: Are you like a converted clutter person?

IS: No. A lot of people, no, I grew up already tidy. My mother was very tidy and we were, that was instilled in my upbringing. However, I just found that her method really simplified my life in certain thoughts. I suffer from mental illness and the structure that this brought and the framing of the positivity versus the negative way to consider decluttering, it's been very uplifting for me in my own life.

AMT: Okay well I want to bring another voice in here. Tim Harford is an economist and writer for the Financial Times. He is also the author of Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives. He's in Oxford, England. Hello.

TIM HARFORD: Hello.

AMT: What concerns do you have about Marie Kondo's approach?

TH: Oh she's a genius. I think she's brilliant, but I think that we need to appreciate that her method has limits. So I'm a tidy person myself and I've done the Marie Kondo method and it works tremendously well for a lot of the things that we have in our lives, but where I think we try and apply it wrongly is in more dynamic situations. So there's constantly stuff coming into our lives, into our houses, across our desks there's paperwork, there's email, for avid readers there's books. Marie Kondo doesn't quite get books, she thinks of them as decorative items, rather than things that you might use. You know when there is a constant flow of stuff in and out of a working space, this one shot method that she advocates of taking something into your hands and asking yourself, do I really need this? Does this spark joy? It doesn't apply. So my kitchen I've Mary Kondo'd the heck out of my kitchen. It's super, super tidy because everything has a place. Everything is lovely. My desk, sometimes it's tidy, sometimes it's messy and if I try to tidy it up without recognizing what kind of space it is then I'm just going to make mistakes.

AMT: What do you think Ivanka?

TH: I think firstly with the books, I don't think that she misunderstands them. One of the main focuses that she talks about is once a book has been read and the information has been received, the purpose of that book is done. You either got what you read or you didn't. If you didn't, you would read it again, if not, why is it sitting on your shelf? I think that was regarding the books.

AMT: Hang on, you're talking to a writer there. I think he wants to say something right away. Go ahead, Tim.

TH: So for example, just this week I'm writing a newspaper column about Thomas Schelling, great Nobel Prize winning economist, who died a couple of years ago and his theories. I wrote a biography of Schelling, I've got some of Schelling's books. I thought about Mary Kondo-ing them out of my house. Did they spark joy? Didn't they spark joy? I thought you know I'm going to keep them because it may be that I need to use them again and turns out I do need to use them again. And these are items that we can't necessarily predict how we're going to use them and that I think is more broadly true. So there's a great psychologist called Steve Whittaker who I think is fascinating. who studies the way that we file the stuff around us, our paperwork, our email and what Whitaker has found is that people who are super tidy and who file stuff away and by the way Marie Kondo says don't be deceived, just over organizing stuff doesn't work. She's absolutely right. People who are constantly tried to file stuff away, end up with too much stuff, all incredibly neatly organized. Whereas people who are messier, who let their paperwork accumulate on their desk, who let emails pile up in their inbox actually they are more in touch with their staff. They know where it is. They have less staff because it sometimes takes time to figure out whether this thing is going to be useful and where this thing belongs. Where does this, which folder does this email belong in? Which folder does this paperwork belong in or maybe it belongs in the trash. So if you're talking about T-shirts or you're talking about sentimental items or you're talking about your kitchen equipment, yes ask yourself whether it sparks joy. But there's a lot of stuff in our life that's much more dynamic and we're constantly having to revise our opinions as to how we should file, where we should file it or whether we should throw it out.

AMT: I have a clip that I want to play because there are some high profile people who agree with you. Before he became president of the United States, Donald Trump, the businessman, was famous for having a messy desk. Here he is in 2015 talking about that desk.

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VOICE: I've noticed over the years, successful people have a lot going on on their desk. My desk is in my office. My desk is a very important part of me and frankly it's a very important part of my success. Everything I do comes right through this desk. So if it's not perfectly neat, if there's a lot of action, I think that's okay. I actually think that's a good thing.

AMT: Ivanka Siolkowsky, do you buy that?

IS: I mean consider the source, I think of all the celebrities to have said that, but I do I do agree with the previous statement that there are things that are happening in life and I don't think even with the KonMari method that she's expecting that everyone is, everyone's room is always going to be tidy and pristine and that's not the idea. The idea is that it's to simplify your life. So do what works for you. These are just some steps that can help get you there. Having piles upon piles of things on your desk, doesnt make sense. If you're not using them, why are they there? Either get rid of them or file them, so that you can find them later. I agree filing everything isn't going to be effective, but I also, I'm not sure about you know having piles of things on your desk. There was, I was reading a statistic the other day that the average office worker spends an hour and a half accumulatively every day looking for something. So imagine if you're an employer and your employees, you're paying them to be searching for things, imagine how much better you would feel if your employee knew where to find what they were looking for when they need it.

AMT: You know there's another side to all of this as well and it has to do with emotions. I have a piece of tape that I want you to hear. This is Laura Morris, who's a Feng Shui consultant and designer in Toronto.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: There's a prevailing notion now with a lot of my clients and people I talk to that if they don't have an immaculate and perfect house that somehow they failed. I don't, I mean I think there's people are trying to gain control over their life maybe or they feel a sense of loss of control if they have all this clutter and mess. But for me, to be honest, I just think that messiness is being given a bit of a bad rap.

AMT: Okay let's unpack a little bit of that. First of all, has messiness been given a bad rap?

IS: I think so, yes. I think, especially with the social media world, a lot of people are expecting their life to turn into an Instagram photo. But if you watch the Netflix series, you'll see that in the end, it doesn't look like perfection. It's what works for those people and every client that I have is different. Every individual is different. So no one's home really ever looks like a magazine photo. It's to make it work for you and I think people are being really hard on themselves, saying well my house doesn't look like a magazine. I have kids, there's things here and there, I'm a failure. That's not true. So people need to kind of lift that weight off their own shoulders and say, you know when I do this process, I need to make it work for me.

AMT: What do you think, Tim Harford?

TH: I keep thinking of Benjamin Franklin, great American statesman, he was America's ambassador to France. His signature is on the Declaration of Independence. He invented all these amazing things, bifocals, and one of the things that he did in his life is to pursue excellency. So he had this thing called a virtue journal where he tried to make himself kinder and humbler and more tolerant and he listed all his virtues and at the end of his life, in his 80s, he's reflecting on the success of his virtue journal and all of the ways he was able to improve himself. And he said, there was one thing that I was never able to do and that was orderliness. He never managed to keep his desk tidy. He never managed to keep his room tidy. He never managed to keep his calendar, his diary clear and organized. He was a messy person. And I think it's astonishing that such a truly great man, I mean a remarkable man who lived a remarkable life, is still beating himself up in his 80s that he couldn't keep a tidy desk and that he didn't stop for a moment and say maybe the desk is messy because I achieved so much because there was so much going on. Maybe that was a part of it.

AMT: And also the very fact that that mattered to him all those years later, maybe he needed Marie Kondo.

TH: Or maybe he didn't because I mean could it, would it really have been any better? Could he really have achieved anything more than he did? I think we need to accept that there is a place for tidiness and I think Marie Kondo has nailed it. I admire her very much and my kitchen as I say it's Marie Kondo'd, but there's a place for mess. There's got to be a space for improvisation, for chaos, for things being imperfect. For a lot of people that is the children's play room, the children's bedroom, for a lot of other people it's the office desk and for others, it's the email inbox. But when if we're doing something, we're being creative, we're exploring, we're getting stuff done that's a messy process. And if we recognize that and are at peace with that, we can enjoy the calm and the tidiness of the kitchen or the bedroom as well.

AMT: Ivanka?

IS: I agree 100 percent. As I mentioned, to every individual, it's what makes you feel most comfortable. So you know clients who call me are people who are uncomfortable in their own space. Clients who are reaching out to someone like Marie Kondo and that method, are people who are uncomfortable in their own space. If you're comfortable in whatever area that you're living in at whatever state of tidiness, then so be it. It's not for other people to judge.

AMT: Well it's interesting too, we look at more about this idea, in that last clip we heard people are trying to gain control. I was watching the first episode of the Netflix series last night and the couple, the friend family, they are trying to gain control. They're looking for advice on how to deal with their kids. They're just kind of overwhelmed with having two kids and having stuff around. It's less about the stuff and more about trying to figure out how they go forward. It ends up like affecting their marriage. How much of the stuff is about stuff, Ivanka, or is that just really a metaphor for something else in our lives?

IS: I think it's both. I mean a lot of couples fight about money. That's the number one thing people fight about. So if you don't have money, but you look around your home and there's a bunch of stuff everywhere, well where did that come from? You spent money to acquire those belongings. So I've had people, if money is an issue in their marriage and I'm working with both members of a couple, we talk about, I have them take tallies of you know what did we spend money on? Why couldn't we afford to take a vacation with the family? Because we have 7000 Legos that my child doesn't play with. We have, I have 20,000 sweaters that I don't wear. People tend to be emotional shoppers, you know if they're having a bad day, they go out and buy whatever, whether they needed it or not. So I think the great thing about this method and especially with thanking your items when you get rid of them is to be conscious moving forward of how you acquire new things.

AMT: And so when you go to someone's home, what do you face? What do you see when you walk in the door?

IS: You name it, I've seen it and the number one thing people say, their reaction when I walk in is please don't judge me, I'm so sorry. And I say you know what, if I judged every house I walked in to, I would be exhausted. I'm here to help people. When I look at a space, I don't see the mess, I'm trying to find the solution right away. So visually, I'm not looking at what's there, I'm looking at how to make it better. If that makes sense.

AMT: And Tim, you're an economist and yet you like this fits into your other work and your other writing, so it's got to be really important. What do you think about the emotion attached to all of this?

TH: I think it's very important to recognize it. You mentioned control, Anna Maria. People are trying to get control of their lives, but often people are trying to assert control over others. And so one of the things I studied in Messy was clear desk policies in the office. You know being an economist, I get to study offices and they seem to be tremendously counterproductive. They were a way for managers to kind of try to feel like they're controlling something because you're in a knowledge economy, very often you can't really see what people are doing or whether they're adding value or not. And so since you can't really see what's going on, you start to control what you can see. And you say well everyone needs to have a tidy desk and the office space is going to look like this and some of these policies are absolutely absurd and one of the studies that I wrote about in the book Messy, it got people to work in office spaces under different conditions. And in one condition, they had a lot of control over what was hanging on the walls, whether they had a pot plant or not and it didn't really matter what the physical space was, what mattered was they felt that it was up to them. And in another run of the experiment, people had that control taken away from them and so they were sitting in what was superficially very, very similar spaces, but the experiment had come in and told them you can't put that there, you can't do that, you can't have that picture hanging there on the wall, it's against our policy. And people felt a tremendous disempowerment and loss of control. They were unproductive, they were angry. Some of them felt physically sick and it wasn't so much about the space, it was about feeling yes I'm in charge of this space or no someone else is in charge of this space and they're just yanking my chain.

AMT: Well that's interesting because again the thing that I noticed in the Marie Kondo episode was she actually leaves and she makes them do the work. Like she's not actually telling them, she shows them how to fold, gives them some ideas and then takes off and they have to confront it themselves. It's like the Wizard of Oz, you've always had it in you.

TH: Absolutely and she also says in her book that you should never tidy up for anybody else. Never throw someone else's stuff away. Never declutter someone else's stuff. They have to take responsibility for that and I think that's absolutely right.

AMT: Ivanka, what do you think?

IS: I agree with your statement of the office spaces not being controlled by someone else. I mean, if I may, those spaces didn't spark joy for those employees and I think it's really important again, for the individual, whatever works for that individual and I will stress that from now till the day I die, that's what's important. So if you are the most productive when your desk is messy and you're able to find something you know, the drop of a dime, then that's working for you. If you're not, if I'm an employer and you're always searching for things and your desk is messy and you don't know where anything is or what's going on. That's where it becomes a concern. Visually, I don’t think it should be about the visuals, it should be about the productivity.

AMT: So why do you think there is so much cultural pressure right now to make our lives and homes tidy and perfect, Tim?

IS: I think there is an economic answer to that question. I think it's that we, stuff is getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper for all kinds of reasons. It's just never been easy to buy a big plastic thing. Clothes have got a lot cheaper, all kinds of stuff is cheaper, but you know what isn't cheaper for most people is physical space. That's particularly true in a coastal city like Toronto, New York, San Francisco, my home city of Oxford. They're super expensive places to get any kind of space, but people are kind of starting to realize that there's something weird going on here. They can buy all this stuff and then they've got nowhere to put it. And of course that has been the case in Japan for longer than it's been the case in Canada, in the United States or in Western Europe. A lot of money, a lot of physical objects, not a lot of space and so maybe we shouldn't be surprised that this idea has swept out of Japan and taken over the world.

AMT: Okay well thank you both for weighing in on this. I'm looking at my messy papers and thinking about it all. Thank you so much. Ivanka Siolkowsky is a certified platinum KonMari consultant. She's with me in our Toronto studio. Tim Harford is the author of Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives. He's in Oxford, England. Well here are The Current when we think about mess, there is one particular desk that comes to mind. Every office has one, right. Our producer Howard Goldenthal is known for being accomplished and brilliant at his job and his desk is undeniably messy. It is laden with books from the hundreds of others he's brought to our program over the years. And it's fair to say that almost every single square inch of Howard's desk is covered in stuff. Here he is talking about it with our executive producer Kathleen Goldhar.

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HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: It's like a temple to knowledge. It's natural insulation against you know nuclear attack because you know paper is a great insulator against radioactive fallout.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What's a standout memory from your mess?

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: I think it was last year, there were, I noticed there were a couple of people actually by your office, young people and they were looking at me and they were smiling. And they were talking to each other and then I think you came over and you introduced me and you said these are two journalists from Syria and they wanted to take a picture of my desk with their iPhones. You know it was kind of flattering that you know my desk now has an international presence.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And do you, like we've tried to get you to clean it up. This is kind of like you did actually throw some stuff away.

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: Well, I'm not married to any of these books. There are some books that I would like to keep and reread. People ask me how do you, how do you find anything? And it's because I generally know where they are. I have deep in the recesses of my mind, a faint memory of putting something down. And generally if I dig, I'll find it. And that's part of the joy right is when you're looking for something and you find something and you think wow, I'm really glad that I didn't throw that out because I haven't read it yet.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Have you ever, could you work at a desk like John's there, where it's neat?

HOWARD GOLDENTHAL: I wouldn't want to work there. Just kidding. I'm sure John's a good person. [Laughter] But you know every once in a while, I'll throw him a book.

AMT: Just for the record, I love Howard's desk and I love the fact that it's nowhere near mine. Incidentally, if you want to see what Howard Goldenthal's desk looks like, you can check out our Twitter feed @TheCurrentCBC for some photos. Are you a messy desk person like our producer Howard? Does it make you feel more creative? Is it helping you think about radioactive fallout and how you'll be protected? Does it bog you down? Tweet us photos of what your desk looks like. Use the hashtag #mymessydesk. We @TheCurrentCBC, tweet us right there. Coming up in our next half hour, I am talking to a whistleblower. Allegations of sexual assault against players on Afghanistan's women's soccer team are tarnishing one of that country's few silver linings. That's our next story. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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Alleged sexual abuse destroyed World Cup dreams of Afghanistan women's soccer team, says former captain

Guests: Khalida Popal, Shireen Ahmed

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you are listening to The Current. It was a beautiful dream for a beautiful game. In 2007, a group of women in Afghanistan came together to play soccer under their nation's flag for the first time.

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VOICE 1: We started playing for fun, playing for having a good time together. We didn't know that this football will take a political side. We faced so many threats, problems, harassment. They grabbed our ball and we stood and said we will go and fight for that. For our right, to get that ball back from them. I was forced to leave my country, but I didn't stop dreaming. I didn't stop the fight, the very important fight of my life, to stand for women.

AMT: That's Khalida Popal, founding member of the team and its former captain. In an upcoming documentary, you heard a bit of it there, the documentary is called Free Kick. She recalls the fight for women to play soccer after years of living under Taliban rule. But now players are raising serious allegations in what some are calling Afghanistan's MeToo movement. Some players are alleging physical and sexual abuse and harassment by members of the Afghanistan Football Federation, which governs soccer in that country. The accusations go all the way to the man at the top of the federation, president Keramuudin Karim. He denies the allegations and they have not been proven. Last month, FIFA suspended Mr. Karim and the country's attorney general has placed five executives on its no fly list pending an investigation. Khalida Popal is the whistleblower at the center of the case. As we heard, she says she faced threats and physical attacks just for playing the game. She fled her home and claimed asylum in Europe. She remains the Afghanistan women's national football team's program and event director and she is in Copenhagen, Denmark. Hello.

KHALIDA POPAL: Hello there.

AMT: I want to lead up to these latest allegations Khalida. So let's begin in February of 2018, almost a year ago, when the team was coming together to train in Jordan. What did you see? What kind of behavior did you see from some of the men who were accompanying that team in training?

KP: Actually it was like two coaches from Afghanistan Football Federation who followed the team to Jordan. The first thing I have witnessed myself in front of all the players and coaches that those two men were bullying the girls and like kind of like making fun of our players saying that their height is not like really good for football and why they have to even try hard to win because they cannot because they are not capable of winning. So these things were so annoying for everyone and they were demotivating. The other thing was like harassment, like sexual harassment of our players. And I was like my first reaction was to stop him and I kind of warned him to do not do this around our team, otherwise I would send him back home. So our players are very young, in a very young age and they are like we have in our team different ages for example starting from 14-years-old to the oldest one is like 25-years-old. So these young women in the team and how the men were harassing and abusing was not acceptable for us.

AMT: Were they actually coaches?

KP: They call themselves coaches. They need to have kind of a position, a title, in order to join the team.

AMT: But you didn't see them as legitimate coaches?

KP: No. No. No, they were not coaching.

AMT: So you're outlining inappropriate comments and inappropriate sexual touching.

KP: Yeah.

AMT: And so what happened when you brought those concerns to the president of the Afghanistan Football Federation?

KP: When we reported, unfortunate when the team went back home, we were waiting for his reaction. So he actually promoted those two men in different positions in Federation and then he provided a kind of contract which is not right really contract ,a player contract to our players that one of the paragraphs in the contract mentions that the players of the national team has no right to talk with any media or contact any media unless they have a letter signed by President of the Football Federation. So it's kind of they wanted to kind of silence us, silence our players. The other thing he did was he announced a list of nine players living inside Afghanistan by the name of lesbians.

AMT: He said they were lesbians?

KP: Yeah. And the players who are inside Afghanistan because Afghanistan's national team has players from inside Afghanistan, from outside Afghanistan and from the players who are brave enough that they were speaking out, they were blamed by the president of Football Federation Keramuudin Karim that they are lesbians and he has seen those players kissing other girls. That's why he kicked out these girls. Being homosexual in Afghanistan, even talking about it, it's like kind of forbidden. It's kind of put their lives at risk.

AMT: You began to ask questions and you started after this training session in Jordan. You began to hear more troubling allegations from players in Afghanistan and I'll warn our listeners that some of the accounts are disturbing. Talk to us a little bit about what your team mates told you happened to them?

KP: For me when I hear it like first, it was heartbreaking and still when I talk about it, it hurts me so badly. When my girls, one of our players, who told me how she was sexually abused and raped by the president of Football Federation himself in his office. So he has a system inside his office that the door opens with only his fingerprint. So it's kind of getting in prison and he has a secret room where he takes the girls inside that room and rape them and it has happened to so many young girls inside the federation. They were like our hope for the future and all of a sudden, we were missing those girls. All of a sudden they disappeared from the team and that made us kind of question mark for us, what happened to those girls? And when we found out what happened to them, the first thing I did was to complain to FIFA because FIFA is the governing body of this federation and I spoke with FIFA and AFC, Asian Football Confederation, were the people that I knew and I could trust.

AMT: How did they react?

KP: The thing is like the people from Asian Football Confederation, they were like kind of they told me that we know this and they were kind of like laughing about them and saying that yeah we have told so many times the general secretary. We have received some of the complaints, but you know it's difficult to control since we cannot go inside the country.

AMT: And what did the FIFA people tell you?

KP: When I say to FIFA, it was directly to Sarai, the head of Women's Football Committee and she took it very serious. She was, I could see in her eyes, how disappointed she was when she hear.

AMT: And how did you investigate their stories?

KP: So I meet the last of the people who were abused. So I have heard from different people, so I was like talking with different people who are in different time periods in Football Federation of Afghanistan, to ask them like if they have seen something or witness something and they were telling me the story.

AMT: Had any of the women who told you, had they reported those incidents? Had they even talked to anyone before they talked to you?

KP: So the girls even went to some of the local media to tell their stories. They told their stories and asked to cover those stories.

AMT: And do you know if anyone from law enforcement in Afghanistan was alerted or tried to do investigations?

KP: There were some complaints from the girls to some law enforcement or some of human rights organization.

AMT: And so you make the point that Mr. Karim is a very powerful man. He's a former governor as well in Afghanistan.

KP: Yes.

AMT: So when you started speaking out about this, how worried are you about speaking out and making these allegations public?

KP: I knew that the risk will be very high. I knew that I will face a lot of challenges and problems, but I had to raise my voice together with amazing teammates to kind of protect our players and clean the system. I faced a lot of challenges like mentally, physically, I would say because the amount of insults and like threats that I have received directly from Afghanistan from people who are supporting the president of Football Federation, it was like scary and like tiring and kind of like it was heavy. But of course I have also received a lot of support from around the world from people from both men and women from around the world, which makes me even more stronger and motivates me to be to stand stronger and raise my voice.

AMT: What about the women who are in Afghanistan who have talked to you? I know you're not using their names, but some how safe are they?

KP: So it is dangerous and it's getting more dangerous, especially the girls who are in Afghanistan, they are like really under pressure.

AMT: Khalida Popal, I want you to stay with us. I want someone else to come into this conversation. She's with me in our studio listening to you. Shireen Ahmed is a Canadian sportswriter. She has taken up your team's fight and started a petition calling for more action and support from soccer's governing bodies. She's with me in our Toronto studio. I know the two of you have met, so you might want to say hi.

SHIREEN AHMED: Hey Salaam Khalida, how are you?

AMT: Salaam, hi there. How are you?

SA: I'm good. Nice to talk to you.

AMT: It's good to have you both on together now. Now Shireen Ahmed, how did you react when you first heard of the allegations that Khalida Popal is outlining here?

SA: I mean the story that was broken by Suzanne Wrack of The Guardian, she's one of the major football writers, I read it and I felt physically ill. They're harrowing and they stay with you. And I followed the journey of this team for a while. I had Kelly Lindsey, who's one of the coaches and Khalida on the podcast that I co-host last year. And the story of this team is incredible. Khalida's effort to literally bring something out of nothing, just for the passion of the game and hope for betterment for women in Afghan society. It's a beautiful story. I'm a footballer. I love the sport. They love the sport and it's a connecting and it's something that bridges us together. So Haley Carter and Kelly Lindsey are the coach and assistant coach and they're American women, who just brought it on themselves and took this up to create this incredible team to help, coach, foster, develop. And we're talking about a team that is not actually all in the same place. So as Khalida mentioned, there are some players that are in Germany, some are in Denmark, there's some all over. So they get together for training camps and they Skype, they WhatsApp, they use whatever they can and it's this incredible story of what football looks like now and what can look like.

AMT: And then you get these allegations.

SA: And you get these allegations and Khalida also mentioned before this, just precursing this a little bit, was the issue of the contracts that came out. And Shabnam Mobarez, who's the acting captain said, she posted very publicly that this wasn't a contract. This was basically to sign off on your life. It offered no protections for the players. No means for remuneration. So it's basically saying you'll do this along our lines and the entire thing is like a cesspool of like control and misogyny. And we're talking about a contract for footballers. We're talking about women who really need to have the opportunity to also get compensation. I mean they're professional footballers. They're are expected to do well and perform well and develop, but they also need to live and I mean we see this the world over. I mean you know parity in pay is just not a reality yet for women in sport, particularly in football.

AMT: What are you asking for in your petition?

SA: Very specifically, one of the things that was highlighted and I take my cues from this team because they're the ones on the ground dealing with it. I wanted to see more of accountability. Yes FIFA suspended Keramuudin Karim, but that's not it. You don't get to suspend and then you know the typical FIFA response is to set up a committee to look at the investigations because they're fabulous at setting up committees, but let's see something else. I want to see change and as Khalida said, cleaning up the system is imperative. In the same time, the Afghanistan Football Federation needs to continue. This is not like we want to shut the whole thing down because the team needs to continue.

AMT: So what's the public response to your petition?

SA: I have over 1400 right now and I started it I think about five days ago, four or five days ago. And it's calling out specifically you know I'll name Gianni Infantino, who's the president of FIFA and Shaikh Salman Ibrahim Al-Khalifa, who is the president of the AFC, to say you need to be more accountable. You need to support them on this journey, specifically on this journey of development of the Afghanistan Football Federation and you need to do something. Do something meaning cut ties with the people against whom there are these allegations of abuse.

AMT: So the man who is suspended from FIFA, the Afghanistan Football Federation president, Mr. Karim denies all of the allegations. We have tried to contact him. We have not heard back. He did tell the news agency AFP that it is a conspiracy these allegations are, that there is no proof and that the players are accusing him are trying to build claims for asylum. Khalida Popal, how do you respond to that kind of response from Mr. Karim?

KP: Of course, I mean he will reject and he will deny all of these things and he has no idea. He never thought that one day a group of women will stand together against his power and how he misuses his power. But it's first time, thanks to Kelly Lindsey who brought unity amongst our team for the first time, that we could stand together. And he is surprised and what he's saying has no idea what he's actually talking about because talking about asylum, for example I'm the one standing and Shobnam Mobarez is the one and some of the others players. We have already permission to stay in these countries and it has been like six years we have left, like I have left my country. So it's nothing about asylum and all these things that he's making stories.

AMT: OK. Well let me, I have a couple of other things I want to get your response to. The Asian Football Confederation has issued a statement saying it "vigorously rejects false accusations made with regard to the AFF's women's national team and that it has a zero tolerance policy toward any such type of behavior." How do you respond to that?

KP: Surprised. I have lost hope towards like Asian Football Confederation. We have been like pushing a lot.

AMT: I also want to read you what FIFA has sent us. This is a statement and I'm quoting again, "FIFA is strongly committed to promoting the safety and well-being of all individuals involved in football activities, especially potentially vulnerable people requiring specific attention and protection. FIFA has a zero tolerance policy on human rights violations and condemns all form of gender-based violence. The serious subjects mentioned are being looked into by FIFA. As some aspects of these allegations involve sensitive topics linked to the protection of those involved, the matter is currently being addressed in a do no harm way toward the victims, with reputable entities with which FIFA has formed a strong working relationship on human rights related issues in recent years. Once the facts are established, whatever remedial measures needed will be taken." Khalida Popal what do you say to what FIFA put out?

KP: I think like FIFA is like from day one that they listened, especially I would say not FIFA, but I would say directly to one woman who listened and took that serious and brought it to FIFA. I'm becoming like more hopeful. I think whatever happened to our team, it's an alert or alarm call for FIFA to think about the system, how to protect female football players, how to kind of make a system that players can easily from wherever in the world they live, easily report these cases, especially the sexual abuse. The coaches, the players, the referees, we need a clean system. We need a system that protects football. Football is a beautiful game and nobody should put their dirt in this game.

AMT: Shireen Ahmed, how confident are you in how FIFA will address this?

SA: I mean I echo Khalida. I'm not super hopeful. We know the history of FIFA. We know how they look at women in sport. We know that there's no, these statements that we have a zero tolerance policy. I mean FIFA's complicit in enabling sexism, institutionalized sexism against women. With we've seen what they've done with lack of pay. There is players currently, this is just one issue of violence against women. We've seen women not being remunerated. We've seen women banned from stadiums. So I am not putting a lot of hope into their idea of resolution and any type of reconciliation. I know that the women themselves and this team of the Afghanistan women's national team are resilient and we women don't look to men for solutions. We create our own solutions for the problems that men have created.

AMT: But this is an organization run by men.

SA: Well that it's. 95 percent of all of these and I would say 98 percent of these governing bodies have men at the table.

AMT: So you're saying you don't look to men for solutions, but you've got to go to FIFA for this. Do you not or do you?

SA: I think you need to go to them, but what they do is cave to public pressure. They're going to cave to things like petitions. They're going to respond to public outcry and to media. The one thing that they will reply to is media.

AMT: Khalida, you have been using the hash tag MeTooAfghanistan. What does that movement mean for women in Afghanistan?

KP: This topic, like people from my country was waiting for a kind of a movement for a voice that they start like talking. They tell their experiences and today men and women non-stop has been talking about this. It's like every day there is a new article. Some will write, some will do interviews. So many people from Afghanistan are taking part in this and the MeToo movement of Afghanistan has started.

AMT: Creating this women's team was a real fight for you and a real dream. Remind us what it was like for you playing in the early days.

KP: When I started it was about the mission for life. I would always call that because we came as a group of strong women that we wanted to bring the change in our country. We wanted to change the picture of women in our society where the women has been always presented as a weak human being and as a kind of second class and we wanted to true football, use the power of football, which is known as a man's game, to use as a tool to empower women of our country to raise awareness about the challenges, situations and difficulties that women are facing daily in Afghanistan. For example gender violence, inequality, harassment, all these things.

AMT: And when you began, what was it like? You had planned hiding almost, didn't you?

KP: Yeah, we were hiding until like when because it was not allowed. And when the man outside where we were playing football found out, we were attacked. We were attacked so many times as an individual, as a group, but we didn't give up because we knew what is our mission and our mission is to change it and make history. And we made history for the first time in a country, in a male dominated country by playing football as a first women's national team of Afghanistan. In 2018, we came a huge and big dreams and hope to play in World Cup and represent our country with big dreams in World Cup. We were so happy and hopeful and all of a sudden this happened and once again they tried to destroy the dreams that we had.

AMT: I know you have an injury and you're not playing now. Do you miss the game?

KP: Yes, I do miss it, but I also play football when sometimes I forget my knees are not working.

AMT: Sometimes when your doctor's not looking maybe, when you're not supposed to, but you do anyway.

KP: Yeah.

AMT: How did it change your life, Khalida?

KP: I would say that, I always tell my mom that I'm always thankful of football. The power, the strength that I got from this amazing game is incredible. Today the person that I am, the woman that I am, I'm proud of. I'm proud of myself being a strong woman and there was a time like in a male dominated country like Afghanistan where men and women are feeling ashamed of giving birth to a baby girl and like girls, like giving birth to girls is kind of against the honour. It's kind of a shame and women are not feeling or not appreciating being a woman because of the culture, the way the culture is built. And there was a time that I felt like why am I girl, amongst all my brothers. I'm the only daughter and all these challenges and kind of limitations for me, I wish I was a boy. But today, the power that I have as a woman, it's kind of incredible how women is powerful. Unfortunately, the world has put a lot of pressure on women that women forget how strong human being they are. And today I'm proud of being women.

AMT: That's why you're using that power now to fight for those other women on that team.

KP: Yeah that is the mission in my life.

AMT: We have to end it there, but thank you Khalida for speaking with me.

KP: Thank you so much. Thank you Shireen.

AMT: And Shireen, thank you.

SA: Thank you.

AMT: Well that is Khalida Popal, a founding member and former captain of the Afghanistan national women's soccer team. She's in Copenhagen. Shireen Ahmed is a sports writer and activist. She hosts the podcast, Burn It All Down, with me in our Toronto studio. We did request a comment from Keramuudin Karim, the Afghanistan Football Federation president. We also asked for a comment from the Afghanistan Football Federation and the Asian Football Confederation and have not heard back. FIFA and Afghanistan's attorney general are investigating the accusations against Mr. Karim. None of the allegations have been proven in court. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q Tom Power is next he's joined by actor Simu Liu of CBC television's hit show Kim's Convenience. Now the messy desk pics are coming in. They're looking pretty good and pretty messy. Remember to send yours in with the hashtag #mymessydesk. After our discussion of decluttering and the Marie Kondo method though, we're going to leave you with a reminder that the problem that all of our stuff is hardly new, with problems with stuff. This is the late George Carlin on stuff. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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GEORGE CARLIN: I would have been out here a little bit sooner, but they gave me the wrong dressing room and I couldn't find any place to put my stuff and I don't know how you are, but I need a place to put my stuff. So that's what I've been doing back there, just trying to find a place for my stuff. You know how important that is, that's the whole, that's the whole meaning of life, isn't it? Trying to find a place for your stuff. That's all your house is. Your house is just a place for your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time. That's all your house is, it's a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You see that when you take off in an airplane and you look down and you see everybody's got a little pile of stuff. Everybody's got their own pile of stuff. And when you leave your stuff, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn't want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They don't bother with that crap you're saving. Aint nobody interested in your fourth grade arithmetic papers.

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Jan. 8, 2019 episode transcript

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