Female empowerment at Lebanon's First Female Roller Derby Team
Nisaa FM: - Have you ever heard of roller derby? If not, this might be about to change. Roller derby is a new, radical sport and it is spreading in the Middle East with Beirut’s first female roller derby team. There are also leagues in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and the region’s first team, Egypt’s Cairollers, was founded amid the revolutionary fervour of 2011.
Roller Derby Beirut was started by a Danish roller derby veteran
Roller derby is a contact sport played by two teams of five with each team roller skating in the same direction around a track. In a series of short match ups (jams) both teams scores points by lapping members of the opposing team. It is a growing international sport dominated by all-female amateur teams, in addition to a growing number of male and junior roller derby teams.
When moving from Denmark to work with GAME in January 2015, an organization which encourages street sports, roller derby veteran Elisabeth Wolfhechel started Roller Derby Beirut. She has since returned to Denmark and GAME provides support rather than steers the league.
Wolfhechel started by accumulating donations from across the world. To this day the team depends on donations of roller derby equipment, as some of it is not sold in Lebanon. The equipment in this contact sport includes protective pads and helmets, mouth guards and of course roller skates.
The next thing to happen was the arrival of Nada Ben Jemaa, the current team manager of Roller Derby Beirut and a student at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Having recently moved to Beirut herself, she wondered whether there was a team and came upon Roller Derby’ Beirut’s Facebook page. Elisabeth Wolfhechel answered and the rest was history.
Being pioneered by women, the team is inadvertently a testament to these girls’ success at female empowerment. They also spread a message of diversity and acceptance as the members themselves are a pretty diverse bunch.
The team is like a family away from home
All the team members seem to operate almost like a family, with nicknames given to each member. Some of these nicknames are Shiny Tiny, Resting Kickface, and Lazy Cake. This closeness has been achieved even though the members hail from UAE, Bahrain, Yemen, Tunisia, Egypt, and Beirut. The girls join together once a week for two hours in East Beirut, to practice and just have plain fun.
The team has helped them feel a bit less homesick especially with members who come from politically unsettled countries. “Sometimes I’m in a state where I want to do nothing and I’m just frustrated or sad because of the situation in Yemen. I’ll be on my way to practice, not saying anything to the other girls, just putting on my headphones and walking. Then I reach and put on my skates, and it changes without me even realizing,” says Hadeel Hassan Al-Hubaishi, a twenty-year-old Yemeni business student. She wears a white headscarf under her sticker-covered helmet. Her small frame and the gemstone embedded in a tooth have earned her the nickname 'Tiny Shiny’.
'Tiny Shiny’ would like to set up a roller derby team in Sana’a some day; she thinks that girls would be into it, especially if conservative families were placated by female-only practice spaces. “It would be a great chance for girls in Yemen to actually do something fun,” she says.
The team is not only a step forward in Beirut’s growth as a city but also a huge leap in female empowerment as these girls constantly prove that women can do anything.
Source: www.huckmagazine.com