From an article in the New York Times yesterday, a creative solution to a problem: how to provide clothing for Somali Muslim girls in a refugee camp in Kenya so that they have freedom of movement while playing volleyball but don’t violate religious norms?
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 [Farhiyo Farah] 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 100 degrees.
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,” Ms. 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.
Changing the uniform, however, as a corporate partnership with the United Nations refugee agency is about to do, presents a quandary. “Most of us are Muslims and we want to preserve our religion,” Ms. Ibrahim said. “We don’t want pressure from the community.”
Well, a girl can dream. They have indeed been subject to pressure, since girls’ sports are such a novelty that they have been denounced by sheiks for being unladylike, stared at and derided as prostitutes (lovely, huh?).
What’s really heartbreaking is that even though these girls are in a refugee camp, having fled from war and famine in the early ’90s, with little to do, they’re actually a lot better off than they’d be had their families stayed put.
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 back home, but their lives are still dismal, at best.
“Refugee life is very difficult,” Ms. 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,” Ms. Ibrahim said.
Ms. Ibrahim, incidentally, is 23, which means that she’s escaped early marriage and childbearing (at least I presume — I get the sense that married women don’t play volleyball).
The creative solution came as a result of Nike’s working with the UN High Commissioner of Refugees to send four designers to the camp to work with the players and the community to design appropriate attire. And it looks like the women of the community won out in some ways:
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 Mohamed, 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,” Ms. Mohamed 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.
I’ve had issues with Nike’s corporate practices before, such as their use of sweatshop labor, but this is a good example of good corporate world-citizenship. It’s good for these girls — they get their needs taken care of, and they also get some skills taught to them — and it’s good for Nike’s bottom line, since I’m sure they see a market out there for this kind of attire.