Young women wearing hijabs, the traditional Somali attire, play volleyball at a refugee camp at Dadaab, in northeastern Kenya. Three refugee camps around Dadaab are home to 127,000 people, most of them Somalis who fled the war in their country in the early 1990's and have lived in limbo ever since.

By Marc Lacey

DADAAB, Kenya, March 20, 2006 – Rather than the clingy and attention-getting athletic attire that Serena Williams favors on the tennis court, baggy and nondescript are what Farhiyo Farah Ibrahim and her volleyball teammates are after.

"You can't show any skin," Ibrahim, 23, said during a break in a pickup match, explaining the dress rules for women, those who play sports and those who don't, at a remote refugee camp for displaced Somalis in northeastern Kenya.

Girls start wearing the free-flowing Somali hijab at the age of 7.

They keep it on, wrapped around their heads and draped loosely over their bodies, for the rest of their lives, at least when men are around. For Ibrahim and other women, the hijab is the only attire they know, one they say they grow used to and do not see as overly restrictive, despite temperatures that routinely exceed nearly 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit).

But when it comes to sports, the traditional hijab can be problematic, they say. The girls wear pants underneath to improve mobility, but they still get tangled from time to time.

"It gets in the way," Ibrahim said, demonstrating how the long sleeves can interfere with a good dig and how the head scarf can shift at just the wrong moment, turning a potential spike into an embarrassing miss.

Nike, via U.N.H.C.R.

Designs by Nike, one of a handful of private companies working with the United Nations refugee agency, streamlined the hijab, allowing freer movement for volleyball players but still covering most of the body.

Changing the uniform, however, as a corporate partnership with the UN refugee agency is about to do, presents a quandary. "Most of us are Muslims and we want to preserve our religion," Ibrahim said. "We don't want pressure from the community."

But pressure is certainly part of the game. Girls' sports are still a novelty in Somali culture, so much so that the volleyball players here have been denounced by sheiks for supposed unladylike acts, like running or extending their arms in the air, and gawked at by boys unfamiliar with seeing women doing much more than cooking or cleaning or carting water on their heads.

"Some people think that if girls play sports they are prostitutes," Ibrahim said. "Our parents were embarrassed. They had bad feelings about girls playing outside."

Attitudes are changing, the women say, but slowly. That helps explain why they are not interested in the abbreviated shorts and form-fitting tops that women's volleyball players in other parts of the world wear.

All these young women dream of is a sporty hijab, one that covers them but does not cramp their style.

A game of volleyball is one of the few escapes around here. The three refugee camps around Dadaab are home to 127,000 people, most of them Somalis who fled the war in their country in the early 1990s and have lived in limbo ever since. It is so difficult to attract international assistance for these long-term refugees that the UN World Food Program announced last week that it had cut food rations by 20 percent.

Life is particularly challenging for girls, who rarely attend school, marry early and then spend their days struggling to feed their many children.

Girls in the refugee camps go to school at a significantly higher rate than those whose families remain in war-ravaged Somalia, 58 percent here compared to 7 percent there, but their lives are still dismal, at best.

"Refugee life is very difficult," Ibrahim said during a break in a volleyball game. "We're away from our motherland. It's like being in prison."

On the volleyball court, however, girls say their troubles fade away for a while. They say they have no time to worry what clan the girl next to them or across the net might be. They also have no time to think about the man their parents might be arranging for them to marry or the work that awaits them when the match is over.

"We just play," Ibrahim said.

Soon they will be playing in style. Nike, one of a handful of private companies working with the UN commission for refugees, sent four of its apparel designers to Dadaab last year to help the girls design something conservative, comfortable and suitable for serving.

The community was called together to assess the designs, and a spirited discussion ensued on the future of Dadaab's young women.

There were condemnations of sports by some of the traditionalists. But the views of people like Zainab Hassan Muhammad, an older woman who supports the girls, won out.

"I told them that the girls' bodies need exercise and that there's nothing wrong with that," Muhammad said.

Eventually, the most conservative designs were passed over in favor of the one the girls preferred, which retained cultural norms, covering from head to toe, but with less fabric to impede the game.

Hannah Jones, Nike's vice president for corporate affairs, said the company would purchase and donate enough material for several hundred uniforms. The Nike designers have already taught some of the girls how to sew the outfits themselves using locally produced fabric.

The girls at Dadaab, who tend to play in flip-flops, expect that the uniforms will encourage even more young women to take up volleyball. But the biggest effect, these competitive women say, will be on the quality of their game.

"Our arms will be free now," said Hamdi Hassan Hashi, 27, one of the better players. "There won't be as much cloth in the way."

Source: New York Times,

Home | Contact us | Links | Archives