Jordan skate park ‘makes me forget that I am a refugee here’
Skateboard reserve and lessons provided by charity bring relief for children driven from conflict zones
Mohammed Duma looks on with some apprehension as his daughters, aged 2 and 4, try their hands at riding a skateboard at 7Hills Skate Park in Amman, Jordan.
“We come here every Monday,” says Mr Duma, 40, a Sudanese who fled the war in Darfur with his family. “Life in Jordan is very expensive. It’s the only place where I can take my girls to play and have fun for free.”
Salima Issa, 26, sits nearby on a patch of grass with her 2-year-old son who is busy nibbling on crackers. She watches as her son Mohammed, 4, and daughter Amniya, 8, cruise by on their skateboards.
Ms Issa also fled Darfur, where the conflict that broke out in 2003 has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions of others.
But here, at the skate park named for the seven hills on which Amman is built, her children can forget about the past and get on with the job of having fun.
The 650-square-metre concrete space was built in December 2014 by skateboard enthusiasts from around the world as a place for refugee children to play.
The money was raised in a campaign by a German charity and a local association that offers free classes for the children of refugees from countries such as Syria, Iraq or Sudan.
“This park has become a breath of fresh air for young refugees from Sudan,
Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Palestine,” says Mohammed Zakaria, one of the park’s Jordanian managers.
Skateboarding “is a difficult sport, which allows you to gain self-confidence and learn that falling is not the end of the world, and that you have to try a second and third time to succeed”, says Mr Zakaria, 32. “Life is like that and we all learn from our mistakes.”
He says about 140 boys and girls the take free classes, mostly run by foreign volunteers, every week. Jordan hosts refugees from more than 40 countries, including more than 650,000 people from Syria, the UN refugee agency says.
More than 80 per cent of the Syrian refugees live below the national poverty line of 2.2 dinars (Dh11.4) a day. Facing a 40 per cent shortfall in funding, the UN is able to provide only 30,000 of the most vulnerable families with monthly assistance of about 130 dinars.
So free entertainment and exercise for children is a blessing. Yussef Khaled, 14, who lost his father in Somalia’s war, arrived six years ago with his mother and sister and does not miss an opportunity to go to the skate park.
“There are not many places to have fun in Amman, and even if there were we wouldn’t have the money to go,” Yussef says, showing off his latest skateboard trick.
“This place makes me forget that I’m a refugee.”