Girls arrive with schoolbags hanging off one shoulder before they’re tossed to one side. For most, this is the highlight of their week, and for some, it is the only activity in their schedule whatsoever.
Although team members are all girls in their teens, training sessions are frequented by some local faces, including 9-year-old Karim, who lives nearby, and 47-year-old Majdi Majzoub from Palestine, who coaches the team.
Majzoub is the founder of the Palestine Youth F.C. basketball team, who train twice a week in the Horsh Beirut playing fields.
Despite its name, the RPY team is for Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian girls, the majority of whom live in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp, where the older the youth get, the more families rely on them to lessen the weight of financial pressures.
“The situation is very bad,” Majzoub says. His real concerns are girls being married too young out of economic necessity.
Majzoub is the coach of a boys’ football team as well as the girls’ basketball team.
He looks to prevent boys being pushed by their families to drop out of school and join Palestinian political parties to start making a living.
“The [Palestinian political parties] don’t give a good future. Just a salary, a center to stay, a place to smoke,” Majzoub says.
But he has one condition for youth to participate. “If you drop out of school, don’t come.”
Majzoub enforces this rule by creating a strong relationship with players’ parents, so he knows how they’re progressing in school and if they make trouble at home.
“It’s not just about basketball,” Majzoub says. “Because the kids love to play sports so much I can encourage [them] in [their] life outside of sports.”
“I’ve been through so many problems [with] family and studying, but I see a bright light playing basketball,” says Marwa Hamdan, an 18-year-old from Palestine who has been playing basketball for two years.
Recently her parents divorced. She described the first time she trained since their split. “I laughed so much. It [really] helped me.”
“Basketball opened a lot of [opportunities] for me,” says Amena Madani, a 17-year-old also from Palestine who has been playing for four years.
“Before basketball, I didn’t know what I was going do,” she says.
“After I found out that I can play well ... I said, ‘I’m really good, why can’t I dream bigger?’”
Both players express concerns about their future in Lebanon.
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“It’s really hard to live here,” Madani says. “We can study but we can’t work.”
However, not all the kids who attend training sessions follow Majzoub’s rules. Fafa, a 14-year-old from Syria, dropped out of school a year ago and is awaiting family reunification with her dad in Germany. Majzoub, however, allows her to continue playing. “I’m afraid for her to stop sports. What else will she do?”
The RPY’s fate took a turn when Majzoub met David, an activist. David asked that his last name be withheld.
The two were introduced when David took a trip to Beirut in 2016.
With the help of Daniele Bonifazi, an activist based in Italy, the trio created a plan to connect girls with similar grass-roots basketball teams overseas. In 2018, the girls made a trip to Rome, where they met with other female players their age and played in small-scale tournaments. For some members of the RPY, it was the first time they’d been overseas.
“Rome was a trip I’ll never forget. It was the first time I rode the metro,” Hamdan says.
“I met [new] people. They told me not to stop, you’re still young, do whatever you want, life is really short,” Madani says.
“They [didn’t] say, like, ‘Oh my God, she’s a girl, she plays basketball,’ like here.”
The trips were made possible through independent fundraising.
“We want to build the girls’ trust in themselves. To be active, strong and unafraid. ... But if [they] are coming just for the trip, then no.” says Majzoub, who has turned away five girls who he believed were only interested in traveling overseas.
Aside from introducing players to a new culture, one of Majzoub’s aims of taking the RPY abroad is to increase international awareness of the Palestinian cause.
“When we are going anywhere, my goal, personally, is to talk about Palestine, to raise the flag, in any country I can visit, because always we are looking to return to our home. So, we’re not just going for sports. Especially for me.”
Currently Majzoub and David are organizing trips for teams in Rome to come to Beirut, where they will participate in matches locally and be hosted in Shatila.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
