LIFE AFTER DEATH
Her dad was executed by the Taliban, her family escaped home in Afghanistan, but now Sky Blue FC soccer star Nadia Nadim has finally found...
BRICK TOWNSHIP, N.J. — On a cold, gray morning on the Jersey shore, wind slapping her face and the air as soggy as a sponge, the star striker of Sky Blue FC is carrying on as if it were a beach day. Nadia Nadim may have happier moments than when she is on a soccer field. It’s just hard to remember them. She and her teammates are scrimmaging against a local men’s team, and Nadim is on the front line, her body scarcely wider than a goalpost, her game full of creative riffs and off-the-ball improvisations, the pursuit of goals morphing into her own personal form of jazz, taking her to a joyful place.
“When I am passionate about something the way I am with soccer, I just want to play all the time,” Nadim says.
Sky Blue opens its third season in the National Women’s Soccer League this weekend against FC Kansas City, defending NWSL champions, and Nadia Nadim, No. 9 in your program, provides them with an offensive force with few equals, and a back story with no equals. It’s not so much that the 27-year-old Nadim speaks five languages (English, Danish, German, Persian and Urdu) or is about 18 months away from becoming a doctor. How many international soccer stars do you know who grew up in Kabul, Afghanistan? Who had to flee to Pakistan, then endure a harrowing passage through Europe before being dumped in the wrong country?
Who have had to live with the kind of loss Nadia Nadim has; who have had their father executed by the Taliban?
“One day he left, and he never came back,” Nadia Nadim says.
Seventeen years later, Nadia Nadim, the second of five daughters, is playing professional soccer in Jersey, following a remarkable life journey that she says both of her parents set out for her. She remembers her father, Rabani, as a loving and forward-thinking man who introduced her to soccer and taught her to play inside the garden walls of their home in Kabul, because he knew it wouldn’t be acceptable to the wider world. He was a father who wanted his daughters to be educated, and live full lives. Nadia was 10 years old on the day Rabani Nadim, a prominent and influential general in the Afghan army, was summoned to a meeting with the Taliban. It wasn’t a kidnapping, or any sort of violent apprehension. “Because he was really high-ranking, I think they were afraid of him,” Nadia says. “So they called him in and said, ‘We need to talk to you.’”
She has no idea what they talked about, only that neither she, nor her sisters or her mother, Hamida, ever saw him again. Hamida Nadim spoke to the authorities and searched frantically, days stretching into weeks, and weeks into months. She kept hoping her husband had been detained or imprisoned as part of an effort by the Taliban to muscle the Afghan military out of their
way, and would eventually come home. It wasn’t until six months later that she found out the truth.
A day after he’d been called in to ‘talk,’ Rabani was taken to a remote desert location and shot to death.
“It wasn’t easy,” Nadia Nadim says.
Jim Gabarra is the coach of Sky Blue FC, the team that acquired Nadim on loan last summer from her club team in Denmark. In six games, Nadim scored seven goals and had three assists and led a late-season Sky Blue charge that ended just one point short of the playoffs.
“She’s a shining example of how to deal with life’s difficulties — difficulties beyond anything we can imagine,” Gabarra says.
Katy Freels, a standout midfielder for Sky Blue, is Nadim’s roommate and close friend.
“She’s got so much energy and an attitude about life that’s very unique, and very contagious,” Freels says. “She hasn’t let herself be defined by the trauma (she went through) in any way. Instead, she uses it to encourage other people.”
It wasn’t long after the murder of her husband that Hamida Nadim knew she and her daughters had to get out of Kabul. Even as a young girl Nadia understood that, too, all the more so with the Taliban pushing its hard-line, fundamentalist doctrines.
“If you are a female you were not allowed to go to school,” Nadia says. “Everytime you go out you have to be with a man. Basically, if you are a woman, you are not a full person. My mom knew that if we stayed there we would not have any life.”
Hamida Nadim and her daughters fled to Pakistan, paid for forged passports and a flight to Italy, where they were loaded into the back of a truck, a mother and five kids ranging from 4 to 13, bouncing around the truck bed like loose cargo. The truck was supposed to deliver them to London, where Hamida had extended family. Early on Easter morning, 2000, the driver pulled over and told them to get out, that they had arrived.
The streets were all but deserted. This was not like a big city at all. They saw a man walking a dog. Hamida asked him in halting English where they were.
“You’re in Denmark,” the man said. “Randers, Denmark.” They knew nobody in Denmark, didn’t speak Danish, had not a single connection to the country. Eleven-year-old Nadia didn’t mind that at all.
“As long as we were safe and together, it didn’t matter where we were,” she says.
The local police moved the family to a detention center for a couple of weeks, then to a refugee camp in Copenhagen, where they remained for six months until their asylum request was processed. The girls studied English and Danish, and Nadia got to play soccer for hours and hours every day, her early aptitude for the game quickly flourishing in the free-form schoolyard games she played in. The government finally ruled that they could stay for three years to start, and the family moved into an apartment in northern Denmark, immediately receiving public assistance to get by.
“Without that I wouldn’t be where I am today,” Nadia says of Denmark’s social safety nets.
Nadia’s passion for soccer, meanwhile, seemed to deepen by the day. Soon she was spotted by a local youth club coach, and her climb to prominence took off from there, as she moved through the club ranks, showing a rare combination of technical skill, tactical understanding and tenacity. Goals came in bundles and by the time she turned 18 and gained citizenship, she had joined the Danish National Team, for whom she has more than 50 caps. For the last three years, her club team has been Fortuna HJorring, which loaned Nadim to Sky Blue at the end of last season. The payoff was swift.
“Goal scorers are really hard to find,” Gabarra says. “She just has this pure love of the game that comes out when she is playing.”
Even as she was filling up Danish nets, Nadim had made up her mind that she wanted to be a doctor, and has completed 4½ years of a six-year program at Aarhus University in Denmark. Her intention is to become a plastic surgeon. Another sister is also studying to be a doctor, and a third is a boxer, and training to be a pilot. Hamida Nadim made sure her daughters understood that there were no limits to what they might do.
“I’ve been helped a lot in my life. At some point I want to be able to help a lot of people myself,” Nadia says.
Nadia Nadim has a sewing machine, and makes her own headbands, most of them featuring a rainbow-like assortment of colors. “I like colors. I am a colorful person,” says Nadim, who started wearing her headbands long before they became fashionable. She certainly does not need to do anything to draw more attention on the field. Like every prolific goal scorer, she is a target for tight marking, dirty tricks and physical play. Nadim understands it, even welcomes it.
“It gets me angry, and I play better when I am angry,” she says.
Nadia Nadim’s plan is to keep playing soccer as long as her body is holding up, and then return to Denmark to embark on her surgical career, and says she is looking forward to paying her Danish taxes, among the highest in the world.
“I know it will help people who need it, the same way our family got help,” she says.
In the meantime, there are studies to finish, and goalkeepers to beat, and a high-energy aura to share wherever she goes.
“She’s downright radiant,” Jim Gabarra says. “It’s a gift, and we don’t take it for granted for one N second.” adim is a woman of deep faith, a devout Muslim, but doesn’t feel the need to flaunt her beliefs. In her family, she says, faith has never been something to showcase; it is sacred and private belief, a relationship with the Creator, and openness and desire in her heart to listen and do the right thing. When she sees and hears reports of violence and death in her native Afghanistan, in any place where jihad, or struggle, seems be a license to kill, it leaves her feeling profoundly sad that religion can be used as justification.
“It’s not ending. It just keeps going. I hope that this is going to end someday,” Nadim says. She pauses, and zips up a jacket against the cold and damp after Sky Blue practice late last week. You think of her loss and the father who never came home, and the game he taught her before he was taken away, when Nadia Nadim was 10 years old. Nadia Nadim isn’t playing inside walls anymore, and that feels good. That was what her father wanted. She looks away. Her eyes well up.
“I think he’d be proud to see how far I’ve come,” Nadia Nadim says.