Is This Table-Tennis Champ Held Back … for Being a Mom? – OZY

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Driving down the bustling streets of downtown Hebron within the occupied West Financial institution, air con blasting, we pull over to choose up Rawda Alshreef. A tiny 53-year-old clad in a race-car-red thobe (a dress-like gown), matching excessive heels and a baby-pink hijab, her vitality instantly fills the automotive as she begins cracking jokes. 
It’s not till we arrive on the sports activities corridor, the place she modifies into her black and pink Adidas tracksuit, that she lastly seems to be like the present and longest-reigning feminine desk tennis champion within the Palestinian territories. “In tournaments, they all the time ask the place is Rawda Alshreef?” she says, laughing. “If I’m there, they know that I’ll win. If I’m sick or miss a contest, then they’ve an opportunity.” 
Being an athletic champion at 53, whereas additionally being a mom of 5 and grandmother of 10, is a fairly badass transfer anyplace on this planet. However in Hebron, the most important and most socially conservative Palestinian metropolis, it’s downright unprecedented. However a mixture of circumstance, a patriarchal society and household drama has stored Alshreef from a world breakout to this point. 
Some males don’t let girls buy groceries, so are you able to think about taking part in sports activities?
Rawda Alshreef

Since age 15, Alshreef has not missed an annual West Financial institution championship match. Holding the No. 1 rating for 13 years, she has represented her nation in a number of worldwide competitions. This element is an important for Alshreef, as this can be very troublesome for Palestinians to journey normally and for ladies in conservative households to journey alone. 
“There was a event in Morocco possibly 10 years in the past,” her husband, Abdulrahman, 57, an Arabic trainer, remembers fondly. “They made a celebration round Hebron College for her. In social media posts and newspaper headlines, [they] all the time wrote one thing like: ‘Mom of 5 youngsters wins first place!’”
As a result of she was having children throughout her 20s, her prime athletic years, Alshreef by no means made a run to qualify for the Olympics. For different worldwide competitions, Rawda’s older brother Radwan, head of the Palestine Desk Tennis Federation, has repeatedly chosen different, youthful girls to journey to compete. “Her brother used to inform her, ‘Oh, you have got a variety of younger youngsters, you need to be taking good care of them,’” Abdulrahman says.
Alshreef was handed over for tournaments in Lebanon in 2013 and Jordan in 2011, however her brother factors out he did choose her for different competitions. Radwan says he didn’t wish to choose his sister each time as a result of he needed to offer different girls an opportunity with the federation’s restricted assets, and he didn’t wish to be accused of nepotism. 
 
When she acquired married in her early 20s, Alshreef had one situation: “I’ll get married provided that I can maintain taking part in desk tennis.” And never simply desk tennis but in addition any sport or exercise. She refused to let marriage restrict her freedom, which is usually the case in her neighborhood. “The folks take into account [sports] as one thing foolish for ladies to do as a result of to them, girls simply belong within the dwelling,” Alshreef explains in her typical quick-paced speech. “Some males don’t let girls buy groceries, so are you able to think about taking part in sports activities?”
Alshreef doesn’t keep behind the scenes when she’s not wielding a paddle both. She is a cashier in a marriage gown retailer in the course of the week, and a marriage photographer and DJ on the weekends. 
In accordance with Nibal Khalil, vice chairman of the Palestine Olympic Committee and an anthropologist at al-Quds College, Palestine’s family-oriented society and cultural traditions usually play out in gendered constraints. Add a navy occupation — full with lots of of checkpoints, a allow regime to cross over the 1967 armistice line with Israel, administrative detentions and so forth — to an already restrictive patriarchal society, and you’ve got a spot the place girls are held again. 
“The largest problem is occupation,” Khalil says. “We’re struggling day-after-day with the correct to motion.” She factors out that ladies who stay in villages however wish to practice within the metropolis should move by means of checkpoints, which suggests extra scrutiny of their actions. “By the tip, the social buildings [of Palestine] will get entangled and say no.” 
Consequently, sports activities haven’t been a precedence for the Palestinian folks till lately. It wasn’t till the Oslo peace settlement and the institution of the Palestinian Authority in 1993 that Palestinians began competing within the Olympics.

For Palestinian girls, priorities traditionally centered round marriage and family-building. “These days, it’s training,” Khalil says, however even then, “as soon as [a woman] is educated, the precedence is to get married.” Though the lives of ladies range from metropolis to village to refugee camp, Khalil and Alshreef agree that ultimately, it comes all the way down to the person household. In Alshreef’s case, she acquired fortunate. 
“The Alshreef household is understood for enjoying [racket] sports activities, and within the membership, we’re well-known for successful,” Rawda says. She began taking part in at a younger age together with her fast household. Rawda and her twin brother, Rawdi — a desk tennis champion on the lads’s facet — used to position a towel in the midst of their eating room desk as a makeshift divider and repurposed books as paddles.
However even inside her household, she needed to clear just a few hurdles. Confused as to why she would “waste her time chasing slightly ball,” her father-in-law tried many occasions to get her to cease taking part in. When competing in Morocco in 2012, she missed the beginning of her first grandchild, which created a little bit of a household scandal.
With all this pressure round her taking part in desk tennis, from relations, the neighborhood and even inside the sports activities membership itself, Alshreef was compelled to construct herself independently. And she or he has carried out so not solely with immense success but in addition with pleasure and confidence.
“I don’t care what folks say,” she says with a shrug. “I simply wish to maintain taking part in.”

OZY’s 5 Questions With Rawda Alshreef 
What do you do if you’re not taking part in desk tennis? I additionally play squash and do karate and aerobics. 
What’s your favourite flower? Purple rose.
What’s your favourite meals? Conventional Palestinian meals like stuffed zucchini and grape leaves, maqluba and stuffed hen.
What’s the one factor you may’t stay with out? Being wholesome and in good condition. Additionally my smartphone. 
Who’s your hero? My husband.

Learn extra: As a toddler, she fled from violence. Now her fists might convey her stardom. 

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