Point scored for disabled
Cambodia’s first women’s wheelchair basketball team shows how sport can change attitudes to disability in a country where landmines every week add to the population’s estimated 25,000 amputees
BATTAMBANG, CAMBODIA // Slamming into each other with a metallic crunch, Cambodia’s first women’s wheelchair basketball team are changing attitudes to disability in a nation where uncleared landmines explode and claim new victims every week, yet physical impairments are scorned. Under a baking sun in the western city of Battambang, two all-female sides are battling it out.
Yelps and laughter fill the air, but the game is as ruthless as any professional match with sweat-drenched players dexterously manoeuvring their chairs to block an opponent or find a crucial opening.
At one point a player is knocked from her chair and sent sprawling to the floor.
But she quickly dusts herself off, pulls herself back in and scores minutes later.
A few years ago most of these women languished at home, unable to find work, shunned by their own communities in a country where the disabled are often seen as a burden.
“The first type of discrimination is discouragement from families,” said Sieng Sokchan, the team captain, who was paralysed at 10 when she was struck in the back by a stray bullet outside her home.
To this day she does not know who fired the bullet. “They look down on us disabled people as incapable of doing anything or working – or they feel ashamed when they go out because they have a disabled child or relative.”
Many of the players had little confidence when they started, she said. But sport has helped to change that – and has also affected the way other people view them. Last year some team members jetted off for a tournament in Malaysia, a move that Sieng Sokchan said astounded her neighbours.
“They said to us ‘ Oh you are better, you boarded a plane, you visited a foreign country’,” the captain said.
Three decades of war has left impoverished Cambodia awash with mines. And while significant steps have been taken to clear unexploded ordnance in the past decade, the country still has one of the world’s highest proportions of amputees.
An estimated 25,000 people have lost limbs in explosions, according to figures from the mine clearance charity Halo Trust.
At a Red Cross-run prosthetics factory just a short walk from the basketball court where the women are practising, about 80 per cent of patients seeking replacement limbs are landmine victims.
Lors Nimol, a 34- year- old mother of one and now regular team member, lost a leg while clearing forest in an area close to the Thai border that was once a Khmer Rouge guerrilla strong- hold. She knew the work was dangerous, but needed the cash.
“When I was not disabled, people employed me to pick beans,” she said. “Suddenly I had no job and no money.” In a country where one in five remain below the poverty line, the loss of a single earner through injury can deliver a major financial shock to a family and often leaves the disabled shunned even by loved ones.
Lors Nimol said basketball gave her a reason to get out of the house. “Before when I did not play basketball, I was at home lonely.”
Buoyed by their enthusiasm for the game, the women are now setting their sights on a lofty goal: qualifying for the 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo.
“It’s definitely something we can aim for. Why not?” said
Tang Chhin Sothy / AFP Philip Morgan, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s physical rehabilitation programme in Cambodia, which helps to run the women’s team.
Japan is more than just wishful thinking, Mr Morgan insisted. Last year the ICRC got a men’s basketball team from Afghanistan to compete in the qualifiers for Rio.
They did not make it through but it was a major milestone in a tournament many impoverished nations feel is skewed in favour of wealthy countries.
The charity has been helping a women’s team to get up and running in Battambang and the southern town of Kampong Speu for the past two years, organising the Malaysia tournament and visits from foreign coaches.
They are preoccupied with the crucial task of setting up the country’s first official wheelchair basketball federation, a move that will enable them to begin competing professionally.
“It’s not enough for them to just train, I want them to get a bit more exposure, internally but also internationally,” Mr Morgan said.
While bringing home an Olympic medal may be a long way off for Sieng Sokchan’s squad, basketball is already transforming their lives off the court.
“Since I started playing sport my life has changed from loneliness and hopelessness to one filled with hope and joy,” she said.
“And there is now no discrimination in the family.”