The Long Run
Meet Kadra Mohamed Dembil, an obscure athlete from an obscure country, racing for more than gold
By the time Kadra Mohamed Dembil went to the Junior Olympics in Nanjing China in 2014, when she was seventeen, expectations of female Djiboutian runners were clear. Last place. Maybe second to last.
She would be that final struggling athlete from a poor, obscure nation with a name people have never heard and can’t pronounce. The one spectators clap for in a semi-inspired, semi-pitying way, cheering home the biggest loser. Such a runner, reeled in by the cheers of the crowd long after the other athletes have cooled down and begun interviews, is encouraged. But she is also sometimes embarrassed.
Before Kadra’s time, Djibouti sent Roda Wais to race in the Sydney Olympics, in 2000. After placing dead last in the 800-meter race, she defected, with the help of a Somali Australian. Eventually she married an Australian, had children, and never competed for her country again. In 2004, Djibouti sent no athletes to the Olympics. In 2008, Djibouti sent Fathia Ali Bouraleh to race the 100 meters in Beijing. Fathia false started. And, on the second attempt, she was so nervous from the false start that she ran one of her slowest races of the year. She placed last in her heat, her time the second slowest overall. In 2012, Djibouti sent Zourah Ali to race the 400 meters in London. Like Fathia, she finished with the second slowest overall time, faster only than Zamzam Mohamed Farah of Somalia, Djibouti’s neighbor to the east. No female Djiboutian had yet won a medal for her country. None had ever even advanced beyond the first heat in a major international competition.
Kadra knew the history of female Djiboutian athletes and, for her international debut at the Junior Olympics, she had something else in mind. She knew she couldn’t win, but she had no intention of finishing at the back of the pack. She was determined to launch a new era of female racing in Djibouti. She wanted a race with her name on the announcer’s lips. She didn’t know if that kind of race was possible, but Kadra wasn’t going to Nanjing to aim for last place.
Sport is leisure, running a luxury. In a country where the primary need is basic survival, work is valued more than sports. Adults are too busy, tired, or dignified to run. Kids are not encouraged to run, unless they are playing football, and are generally ordered to sit down and sit still. That way they won’t fall into the open flame of a gas burner, used for cooking in most homes, and they won’t wander into the street where buses barrel down narrow alleyways with little regard for living creatures: goat, donkey, dog, or human. Girls in particular are encouraged to stay home, helping their mothers cook and clean and keep the younger children safe. There is no room in this kind of life for an eye fixed on a golden prize. There is only room to think about where food might come from for dinner. If there is no food, turn off the lights and close the door and try to sleep. Maybe there will be food in the morning.
Djibouti ranks 170 out of 187 countries on the Human Development Index, extremely low but with incremental positive movement in terms of wages, life expectancy, and education. Still, many people live on subsistence diets, with insufficient meat or fresh fruits and vegetables. Unemployment is roughly 60 percent; two in five children live in extreme poverty. Average salaries barely top $220 a month. People can’t afford running gear: shoes, training pants, a sports bra, socks. They can’t afford the caloric expenditure. They can’t afford the time, which they could spend instead trying to scrape together a few more coins by selling tea or gathering sticks to burn as fuel. Running, with a competitive aim and with local compatriots, is a sign of national affluence. Djibouti doesn’t have it, not yet. Still, there are signs that interest is on the rise, that the number of local athletes like Kadra is slowly increasing.
Kadra is ethnically Somali. Another Somali runner, Samia Yusuf Omar, who competed for nearby Somalia and faced similar challenges, put the experience of being the slowest this way, “We know that we are different from the other athletes. But we don’t want to show it. We try our best to look like the rest. We understand we are not anywhere near the level of the other competitors here. We understand that very, very well. But more than anything else, we would like to show the dignity of ourselves and our country.”
Samia raced the 200 meters in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. She came in last. Four years later she fled from fundamentalists who threatened her life because she raced without a headscarf in China. She trekked through Ethiopia to Sudan, then Libya and in April 2012, as an illegal immigrant, she caught a boat headed for Europe where she hoped to find a coach. She never arrived. According to reports from her sister and another Somali Olympian, Abdi Bile, Samia’s boat ran out of gas. An Italian ship approached and several refugees, including Samia, attempted to swim to the Italian vessel. She and six others drowned.
I had interviewed Samia for Running Times in Djibouti a few months before the Olympics in 2008, along with other members of the Somalia running team. She wore a bandana decorated with Somalia’s flag and said she didn’t mind coming in last: She was just happy to be able to run. There is honor in running to show the dignity of one’s nation, courage in stepping onto the track knowing that you will be last. Especially when you run for a country like Somalia, where some of Samia’s training runs were cut short by gunfire. Or Djibouti, where a proverb says women belong either in the kitchen or in the grave.
At the 2008 African Track and Field Championships in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, teams from across the continent sat in the stands with the names of their countries displayed across the backs of their warm-up uniforms. On the third day of competition, the South African contingent approached the Djiboutian team. “Where is Djibouti?” one of the South African athletes asked. “Is it a country? In Africa?”
The Djiboutians nodded and located Djibouti in the air, drawing a map with their hands — the number seven-shaped country of Somalia to the east, Djibouti shaped like a Pac Man with the mouth opening to the crux of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Population 850,000. Viciously hot. Muslim and peaceful and, with the planned construction of new shipping ports and railroads, on the fast track to development. The South Africans thanked them for the geography lesson. Still, if fellow Africans didn’t know about Djibouti, who else would?
Djiboutians are strikingly patriotic and this, in part, stems from the obscurity of their nation and the brutality of their climate. They are proud of their hardscrabble and successful fight to survive. But I think it also stems from what this tiny country has accomplished and is accomplishing. In a region known for Somali pirates and anarchy, Ethiopian drought and poverty, Eritrean oppression, and terrorist threats (and a recent influx of refugees) from Yemen just thirty kilometers across the water, Djibouti remains peaceful, stable, and improving. That patriotism is reflected in athletes like Kadra. “I want to see my flag raised, to bring my family honor,” she says. And: “I want the world to know my name.”
But to get to that point, Kadra has to face local challenges of poverty, sexism, and religious conservatism. For one thing, many Djiboutians believe running damages girls’ ovaries and renders them infertile. Or that once a female athlete has given birth, she will never be able to run again. Boys throw stones and threaten to assault girls while they train. Some thrust out their legs so the girls trip. Some ride by on bicycles, stick out their arms, and brush a palm across a girl’s breasts. Some religious leaders teach that girls who wear pants will go to hell. Kadra knows what people say and believe; she has heard the taunts herself. But she refuses to be intimidated, and has the essential support of her family and her small but tight-knit running community. She needs their encouragement as ballast.
Kadra lives in Ali Sabieh, 151 kilometers inland from the capital city of Djibouti City. The village popped up when the railroad track was built connecting Addis Ababa, the capital of landlocked Ethiopia, to the strategic shipping port in Djibouti. That train stopped running regularly a few years ago, though once in a while one still lumbers through town. As part of China’s “Maritime Silk Road” vision, which will link China to the African continent, the country is investing in a high-speed train that will reconnect Ethiopia and Djibouti via a new rail line, still passing through Ali Sabieh. China hopes this will increase both regional and international trade and establish China as a power player in this strategic region. There are also on-going negotiations for a Chinese military base, Chinese anti-piracy teams, and Chinese investments in Djibouti’s airport, and in its technological and health sectors. Ali Sabieh villagers have a more singular hope once the new train begins running: economic growth. In the meantime, the village remains a dusty blip on the map on the Djibouti-Ethiopia border.
Kadra’s running community mainly trains in Ali Sabieh, where the Djibouti has a training center for the exclusively male National Team. She joined an all-girls running club — Girls Run 2 — in 2012. Girls Run 2 provides shoes, clothes, and uniforms, pays the fees for transportation to races in the capital, and helps families cover school expenses. But the coaches of Girls Run 2 — Cintia Guzman and the former Olympian, Fathia Ali Bouraleh — live in the capital, where they train the second half of Girls Run 2. While Guzman and Bouraleh provide equipment and support, Kadra’s physical training takes place with a handful of other girls and top male runners under Navel Barra, a Cuban coach who lives in an apartment building above the gym at the Ali Sabieh track. Barra makes no distinctions between athletes: gender, team membership, or talent. He trains anyone willing to work hard. Kadra is willing.
Runners in Ali Sabieh have the distinct advantage of lower temperatures. In the city, there are days upon endless steamy days in a row of 110 degrees or more, and temps can sometimes pass 120. Humidity, meanwhile, can drive the heat index into the 140s and keeps Djibouti from cooling even after sunset. Car tires burst in the heat, candles melt without being lit, humans and animals alike huddle in slivers of shade beneath billboards or acacia trees. In Ali Sabieh, however, the humidity drops and the summer temperatures — merely 100, 105, maybe even a cool 95 — feel pleasant by comparison. A steady wind helps, and nighttime allows the slight temporary relief not found in the city.
Route 1 is the only way to reach Ali Sabieh by mostly paved roads from the city, a scenic drive with nomadic camel trains dotting the countryside. Preteen girls herd goats and sheep using branches or yellow tubing, scraps cut from water hoses, to keep the flocks in line. Women squat on the side of the road and sell unpasteurized milk from plastic water bottles. Men wait by blue barrels, expecting a water truck to come by sometime during the day, hour unknown. Closer to Ali Sabieh, the horizon turns brown. Dust devils swirl up from the Grand Bara desert, a vast and flat expanse of nothing: no trees, no bushes, no water, only a line of stones laid by the French military to mark off their annual fifteen-kilometer foot race. The Grand Bara 15K is sponsored by the French military but ever since 1987, when they opened the race to civilians, local and expatriate, the men’s winners and record holders (43:10 by Abdillahi Talan in 1989) have been Djiboutian.
The highway past the Grand Bara, connecting the capital with Kadra’s village, has been nearly destroyed by heat and wind and the massive tonnage of Ethiopian trucks. The sides of the road have fallen off in large chunks of pavement and sunken into the desert, absorbed into Djibouti. Axle-destroying crevices as deep as goats stretch across the road. Deep truck tire paths carve out the desert where vehicles have tried to avoid this nearly impassable stretch of highway.
Roughly twenty minutes after turning off from that dilapidated stretch of highway, a chain stretches across the road to halt traffic. A guard in military fatigues saunters out of a guardhouse and manually releases the chain. Welcome to Ali Sabieh: land of few jobs, low-quality schools, no reputable medical care, limited fruits and vegetables.
Maybe the Chinese-built train will change these aspects of rural Djibouti, but Kadra doesn’t think much about these quality of life indicators. She has family, friends, and a meaningful day-to-day experience as an athlete. She is happy. Kadra is a high school dropout who, according to her mother, was never good in school and chose legs over brains, a good choice for a not-smart girl. A dumb girl? No one says that but the implication is clear and Kadra doesn’t seem to mind. She would rather run anyway. Who needs mathematics and history and literacy? There aren’t many jobs in Ali Sabieh, no matter what, and her only hope lies in her legs.
Or in her siblings. In Djibouti, if one family member has a solid, decent-paying job, the whole family benefits. Salaries are communal — like the bed Kadra shares with her two sisters (her five brothers sleep together in another room), hands and feet tangled during the night, always touching. Like her running clothes, shared with teammates and with one of her sisters who also aspires to be an athlete. She shares the resultant infections and fungi from wearing unwashed, sweaty clothes. She shares dishes, her family eating off a communal plate, scooping rice and tomato sauce up with their fingers. She shares dreams. Dreams of racing. Dreams of a peaceful life. Dreams of glory.
Kadra’s father is a soldier in the Djiboutian military and serves with the African Union in Somalia, which his nation sees as a way to help bring peace there. Al-Shabaab, the brutal Somalia-based terrorist organization that attacked the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya in 2013 and a restaurant in downtown Djibouti City in 2014, targets Djiboutian and other AU soldiers in Somalia. Kadra’s family tries not to worry about him. Al-Shabaab means “the youth,” and Kadra’s girls running club hoped to be a kind of counterweight, to promote peace by developing young people. Running gives them something to do in the holes left by the lack of a quality education and career options. Running provides a community, and a sense of identity and pride.
Kadra’s mother, Fadouma, is unemployed and the family lives off what her husband sends back from his post in Somalia. She and her eight children live in a cement house, their second home in a year — three rooms and an enclosed, windowless kitchen and an open courtyard where a massive satellite dish is used to hang damp clothing and doubles as a shelf for schoolbooks and empty water bottles. At one time the dish was evidence of prosperity, and Kadra’s family’s hoped they could catch television channels from South Africa or Nigeria. But it stopped working. The thing takes up half the courtyard; people have to duck around it to move between the front door and the kitchen.
Ninety-five percent of Ali Sabieh’s citizens live in relative poverty, 76 percent of them in extreme poverty. Kadra’s family has electricity and three meals a day, which marks them as well off. They don’t have running water but since they live in town and near the market, the public water supply isn’t far away, and every couple of days the family refills its storage jugs. A double bed fills half of the largest room and whoever doesn’t fit on the bed sleeps on thin foam mats that are stacked in the corner during the day. There is another mattress in the sitting room and a few pillows serve as chairs. Kadra stretches out on these mattresses between training sessions and watches Bollywood movies or Egyptian soap operas transmitted by RTD (Radio Television Djibouti), the working television another indicator of relative wealth.
In the mornings, Kadra helps her mother work in the house — hand washing clothes, sweeping, and mopping the floor; walking to the market to pick up tomatoes, onions, garlic, and pasta for lunch. After lunch she either naps or watches TV. Later in the afternoon she pulls on her running shoes and jogs to the stadium on the outskirts of town.
To reach the stadium, Kadra walks through the market, past the Palmerie Hotel, and across a half-mile of desert. Her tennis shoes leave footprints in the thick dirt. Animal dung and thorns are strewn across her path. An unfinished building is under construction outside the stadium and, for a while, rumors claimed it would be another hotel. These rumors contained a second rumor — that the hotel would house guest teams for the Indian Ocean Youth Championship scheduled for January 2014. January 2014 came and went with no Youth Championship and little progress had been made on the hotel for six months. It might simply turn into yet another half-finished building, the kind that gave Ali Sabieh a postwar appearance. But bombs never fell here; the decay is instead a result of ambition swamped by reality.
A stone wall surrounds the stadium and the adjacent gymnasium, and Kadra enters through a rust-colored gate that the guard slides open. The four towering lights here are the tallest structures in the village and they creak in the constant wind. Kadra trains on the six-lane track alongside the national team and members of her club.
In Djibouti City, Girls Run 2 team members are forced to train with homemade hurdles built from PVC pipes and, until the spring of 2015, they didn’t have access to a polyurethane track. The Hassan Gouleed stadium in the capital was under construction. The stadium needed it — the track had been speckled with ankle-breaking holes and weeds broke through the surface — but the construction seemed to never end and city teams were forced to train on the beach, in the salt fields, or on rocky trails. Here in the village, though, Kadra and other athletes have the advantage not only of cooler, drier temperatures, but of this high quality track, actual hurdles, and weights made from powdered milk cans filled with cement.
Three thousand meters is Kadra’s specialty but she struggles to improve. No other girls on the team can compete at her level. This leaves her with no one to pace off, no pack to challenge her and push the pace, no one to tuck in behind for shelter from the wind. It leaves her alone with her breathing and her pounding and her thoughts. It leaves her the best in the 3000 meters but still slow compared to international athletes her age. “Runners understand each other,” Kadra says. “Others don’t understand it but the ones you run with, you get it. You encourage each other. They say, biiri, faster. “If they see you struggle, they say you can do it.
“You need a team,” Kadra says.
One member of her team, Sabad, is the one who initially spotted Kadra winning races at school and invited her to the track. Sabad would go on to be the first Djiboutian female to break five minutes in the 1500 meters. She would also become the first to win an international women’s medal — silver at a cross-country race in Yemen later in 2014. The two encourage and challenge each other, but race separately.
Another problem with having few competitors is that sports officials sometimes don’t want to waste the eleven or twelve minutes it will take for Kadra and one or two of her slower teammates to finish their event. That much time spent on a small field — and on girls — is considered a waste. Instead, Kadra and the others, usually Medina and Deeqa, line up a few meters behind the men and run simultaneously. No matter how fast her times or how far ahead of the other girls she finishes, Kadra looks like a pedestrian loser when she lags far behind the men and they lap her. But she stubbornly clings to the inside lane. She refuses to feel guilty for making the men swoop around. If this is how the Sports Federation wants to run her race, this was how she will race it.
While Kadra dreams of making a name for herself and her country on behalf of Djiboutian women, one athlete has been doing exactly that on behalf of the men — Ayanleh Souleiman: 2014 World Indoor Champion in the 1500 meters, gold medal hopeful in the Rio 2016 Olympics. The Djiboutian record holder in both the 1500 and the 3000 meters, Ayanleh has jogged victory laps with the Djiboutian flag draped over his shoulders. He is an international star and a local hero.
Djibouti doesn’t have many celebrities, but Ayanleh’s slender form and gracious smile fill two of the newest billboards in Djibouti: advertising insurance and the social services system. He speaks in neighborhood youth centers about the value of education and sport, the dangers of drugs and drinking. He can’t walk downtown without being stopped multiple times between buildings, and drivers park in the middle of the road so they can jump out to greet him. Beggars offer to wash his car for free; He insists on paying. He shakes every hand, poses for every photo. Women cry when they watch his races on YouTube. A friend of mine whispered, “Maasha Allah,” thanks be to God, and kissed my computer screen when she watched Ayanleh win the Bowerman Mile. Named after iconic running coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, the Boweran Mile closes the annual Prefontaine Classic track event in Oregon and has been rated the best men’s mile race in the world. As of 2015, Ayanleh has won two years in a row.
Among athletes, too, Ayanleh is an inspiration. If another high school dropout can achieve international renown, maybe others can as well. He is sponsored by the Djiboutian Police and runs for its club. The more he wins, the more honor his club gains. And as a result, other teams have begun to sponsor more athletes. One team, the Republican Guard, for years kept a single female athlete running for them, Zourah Ali, the former Olympian. The Republican Guard is the branch of the military responsible for guarding the president, Ismail Omar Guelleh. Athletes sponsored by the Guard have the opportunity to train and race and are also given military training and the probability of solid future employment.
With Ayanleh’s ongoing success, the Republican Guard began to consider more girls. Few other teams raced girls, and if they could recruit the best, they figured, they would have a monopoly on winning. The Republican Guard looked at Girls Run 2 and saw Kadra and two of her teammates. They recruited her in the middle of the 2013–14 season, and she couldn’t refuse the opportunity to train for a real job. So though she began the season racing for Girls Run 2, Kadra finished it racing for the Guard.
Within a few months of making the switch, Kadra’s decision was validated. Being part of a larger, more influential team brought her to the attention of sports officials. They chose to send her to the Junior Olympics in Nanjing. She would run the 2000-meter steeplechase. Kadra had never raced the event and wasn’t sure what influenced that decision. She had tried the steeple just once before, in practice. But she didn’t think about it. She would do what she was asked and she would do it with excellence. She had other things to worry about. She didn’t have a passport, for one thing. She had never flown in an airplane, never left Djibouti, never competed against an international field.
The steeplechase water pit in Ali Sabieh is rarely filled — using water for a track race seemed an incredible waste when few people had enough to wash with. And, when it is filled, Kadra and her former teammates don’t always practice hurdling into it. They swim in it. Other than wells for nomadic camel herders, the pit is the closest thing around to a swimming pool. At home, Kadra uses a plastic bucket and a handled cup for washing. In the steeple pit, she can play and get her clothes relatively clean at the same time.
But she would have to learn to run through water. At first, coach Navel, who still didn’t differentiate between teams and continued to train Kadra for the Guard, filled the pit with cushions and pillows, so she could get used to jumping the hurdle and landing deep, pushing herself up and out of the pit without losing her rhythm, using momentum to propel her forward motion. Eventually, Navel added water. Normally the waterlogged shoes would have annoyed Kadra but this was July in Djibouti. She welcomed the cooling effect.
The constant dry wind blasted sand across the track and sucked moisture from every living thing. Plants withered, goats and sheep huddled under abandoned vehicles for shade, panting. Kadra was used to the way her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, used to the way the wind immediately dried her sweat and left a salty layer over her skin and clothes. She didn’t mind. She only had a few weeks to prepare. “If you like something, you’re going to do it. You can’t stop.” To explain, she refers to the local drug of choice, leaves that are chewed, almost exclusively by men, to provide stimulation. “It’s like khat, “ she says. “When people are chewing, they can’t quit. Running is like that, you’re addicted.” The drug stems the appetite and makes men feel brave and powerful — like kings, as some describe it. In fact, Kadra had carried a bundle of khat, wrapped in a blue and yellow cloth to keep the leaves moist, through the market when she came to meet me for one of our interviews. I asked if it was hers and she laughed. She said it was for her family for after lunch and at home, she tucked it beneath the metal television stand in her sitting room.
“Running is your khat?” I ask, and she laughs. “Haa! Yes, when I’m running, I’m chewing.” She laughs again and it is evident from her raised eyebrows and her mother’s mirthful and disapproving look that Kadra isn’t the one in her family who chews. Still, it is a useful metaphor. “When you have something in your brain, in your heart” Kadra says, referring to her love for running and desire to win, “it is good for you, and you don’t feel tired.”
Kadra’s goal is to do better than the female Djiboutian runners before her, though she has no one locally to show her how to do that. She talks about Dibaba and Defar, both from Ethiopia. When I ask if there are any Djiboutian athletes that inspire her, she says they haven’t gone far enough yet. Except for Ahmed Salah, who won Olympic bronze in the 1988 Seoul marathon, before Kadra was born. And now, twenty-six years later, Ayanleh. Her inspiration has had to come from other countries, or from men.
She wants to change that.
Kadra’s country is 94% Muslim. Her family members are committed Muslims who make faith a practical part of their day, and Kadra finds strength in prayer and in Allah, a sense of being rooted. Though more conservative sheikhs teach that women shouldn’t wear pants or T-shirts, Fadouma encourages her daughter to wear them, and to run. Kadra wears a headscarf when she walks through the village to get to the training stadium but once inside, she takes it off, so that it doesn’t get tangled and impede her practice.
“When you come to your own house,” Fadouma says, “You can do what your house says.” And Kadra’s house, meaning her family, says to do what it takes to win.
Fadouma has mastered a reserved persona. She carries deep furrows between her eyebrows and practices a steady, observant silence. But her stern face softens when she talks about her children or about her own childhood. She used to live in the capital, where she grew up watching the annual half-marathon, the longest race in Djibouti. Every year Kenyan, Ethiopian, Sudanese, or Ugandan runners came and took all the top places, all the trophies, all the prize money. Djiboutians watching the race became so frustrated at always losing that they hurled water bottles filled with urine as the foreign competitors crossed the finish line. Fadouma laughs as she reminisces and the heavy-lidded eyes she passed on to Kadra crinkle at the corners. She clearly adores her daughter.
Fadouma says she would race herself if she could. “But I’m old now, so I want one of my kids to do it.” She urges Kadra on to do more, work harder, go further.
When August 2014 came, Kadra received her passport and a ticket to China. On the plane, she got airsick and was surprised to learn that airplanes had bathrooms, but relieved that she could throw up there instead of on her seat. Her first impressions of China upon arrival were of the “sour” food, the many different nationalities represented in the Olympic Village, and the impressive skyline. Nanjing was beautiful, she says, with buildings taller than she had imagined possible. “People had to work really hard to build those buildings,” she says. She calls the people “open faced,” meaning friendly. Djibouti’s official languages are French and Arabic but the languages known best by rural Djiboutians are Somali and Afar. Kadra speaks Somali. She knows a tiny bit of French, no Arabic, no English, and no one else in Nanjing spoke Somali, but she made friends anyway.
The Djiboutian delegation in Nanjing included three track and field athletes: Kadra, Abdi Aden Abdi, and Mohamed Ismail Ibrahim, known to Kadra as Abdi Fatah. Also included were a female Ping-Pong player and a male swimmer. Fardousa Musa, a sports teacher and president of the Taekwondo Federation, was one of the officials who came along for the competition. She had two goals: to see how Djibouti could one day compete in Taekwondo, and to spur on female athletic success. “I don’t know what language Kadra spoke in but she was so friendly and made so many friends in the Olympic Village, everyone wanted to take pictures with her. She was so brave and open,” Fardousa said. “I really admire this young girl.”
Kadra’s race was scheduled for August 21. Her best time coming into Nanjing was 7:57, the slowest on the roster, which discouraged her, at least initially. “Wow. With this time, I’ll be last,” she said, according to Fardousa, who described the conversation to me.
“It doesn’t matter,” Fardousa told her. “Run your best.”
Another official added, “Don’t worry about your placement. Just finish the race, get a decent time.”
At that point Kadra leaped out of her chair and stood up tall in front of all the officials and coaches. She looked hard at Fardousa. She waved a finger around the room. “Not only will I finish the race,” she said, “but I swear that I will not be the last.”
Fardousa was impressed. She had never seen a Djiboutian girl with so much pure desire, so much wanting. She believed Kadra had what it would take to not only be a competitive athlete, but a role model. Kadra exuded hope and determination in the face of more experienced and better-trained adversaries, the kind of hope that many Djiboutians need to simply get through the day. Especially Djiboutian girls.
In Djibouti, excuses abound for why girls can’t be athletes. Some people make the case that the headscarf — worn for modesty — impedes training. Fathia Ali Bouraleh didn’t accept this; she raced in the Olympics with her headscarf on and said it didn’t affect her at all. Others simply argue that girls aren’t physically strong enough to race well or that they need to stay home to care for their families. And then there are the theories and tales about female genital mutilation, the practice of cutting and sewing women’s sexual organs. FGM is illegal in Djibouti and waning in popularity but still common, especially in rural areas. One tale about it is that the bodies of women who have endured FGM are particularly fragile and needed to be protected from such things as running. Yet many athletes who have experienced FGM insist that it doesn’t hamper training. For a few girls who have experienced the most severe type of FGM, with extensive sewing and narrowing of the vaginal opening, monthly periods are excruciating and render them unable to train for a few days each month. But for the majority, running can ease menstrual pain.
Djiboutian girls sorely need female role models to show them that they can overcome such gender-specific obstacles. “We need someone to be like Ayanleh,” Fardousa said. “Someone well-known, who can bring medals now, so girls can say, ‘I want to be like that.’”
Kadra doesn’t feel afraid or nervous by her last-place position going into the race, just motivated. She believes what she told the delegation. “I told myself, ‘if you are getting tired, everyone else is getting tired too. We are all the same, so you can do it, don’t think about it, just run.’ I put all my ability out there. I just ran.”
She wears green spandex shorts, the same mint-green as in the Djiboutian flag. She had tried to tug her shirt down over the tight shorts but ends up tucking it in to keep the thick, non-wicking material from sliding against her skin. Baring her body makes her more nervous than thinking about the race, but she decides not to focus on that.
She is smaller than the other athletes on the line, almost a head shorter than the blond Polish girl beside her. The time the announcer gives as her personal best had been run in a practice session just weeks earlier. Other girls had posted times at international events. But she is ready. She has to be.
She toes the line. The gun goes off. Kadra quickly moves to the inside lane. She drops to the back of the second pack while a Kenyan and an Ethiopian glide on powerful, confident legs to an early lead they will hold through the finish.
But Kadra isn’t satisfied with her position in the back and in the fourth lap, out of five, she starts clipping past other girls. In the last one hundred meters she moves from fourteenth to eleventh place and crosses the finish line in front of six girls, with a fifty-second personal best of 7:07.
“The first thing I thought when I crossed was that I wanted better than eleventh,” Kadra says. “I wanted to make it to the front, to be at the top. My time was good but I can break 7:00. I can break 6:00. I want more.”
Kadra would race again two days later in the “B” final, a chance for these budding athletes to gain the experience of a second race even though they didn’t place in the top times. This time she is expected to finish in the top, to claim a position on the podium. As the television announcer transitions from the javelin event to the steeplechase, he says that Kadra is one to watch. “The other athlete who may well be in the mix, Kadra Mohamed Dembil, scored a huge personal best in qualification, down from 7:57 to 7:07. An amazing performance.”
Kadra is homesick. She has never been so far away from her mother and siblings. No one shares her bed; no one bumps against her, skin on skin, while she sleeps. She isn’t able to call Ali Sabieh from Nanjing and the closest connection she has to family in China is a phone call with a delegation member, Fardousa’s sister, who lives in the United States and who then passes messages on to Kadra’s family in Djibouti. She has never been so cold, a cold that sinks in deep. It has been cloudy and drizzling for days and the stadium doesn’t have a full roof. She’s never gone so long without seeing the sun. Her stomach hurts, maybe from the strange food or lingering jet lag. But Kadra doesn’t want to give excuses. This is her chance.
Again she takes a slow start at the gun and hangs at the back of the pack. But by the third lap she has pushed up to a solid third position. If she can hold this pace she has a chance at third, maybe even second.
At the third water jump, Kadra’s landing leg buckles beneath her and she tumbles forward. She hits her palms on the bottom of the pit, under water. She glances back to see if anyone is about to run into her and within seconds is out of the water. But the fall steals her momentum. The nearly full dunking interrupts her rhythm and the lead pack moves ahead. “She’ll be feeling pretty cold and wet, I would imagine,” the announcer says. This is not the way she had hoped to hear her race described.
Kadra’s legs feel stiff from racing twice in just a few days, something she has never done before. Her shoes are soaked and heavy and she can’t muster the closing speed she needs. With no last burst of speed, Kadra crosses the finish in fifth place. Her overall ranking falls to fourteenth. 7:13:44. This is still far better than the 7:57 she brought to China. Coach Navel and the rest of the delegation praise her effort and repeat, with obvious pride, her time from the first race but Kadra feels a twinge of disappointment and anger at herself.
Later in the competition, Abdi Fatah, her teammate, places third in his race and stands on the podium for a bronze medal. Up goes the Djiboutian flag and Kadra shoves back thoughts of her second race. She concentrates on the colors rippling overhead: blue, green, and white, with a little red star. One day, she will stand on a podium beneath those colors. She has tasted international competition and the international running community and she is hungry for more.
Kadra’s mother wants more, too. She wants Kadra to be like Ayanleh Souleiman, at the top of the world. She laughs dismissively, almost as if she is embarrassed, when I suggest she is unique for encouraging her daughter so strongly, against what seem like powerful cultural norms.
But that is the difference between the sweeping generalizations of culture and individual stories. A proverb says girls belong in the kitchen or the grave, but a specific mother says her specific girl belongs on the track. A crowd of teenage boys insults girls while they train but Kadra’s brother boasts of her race times and stands proud beside Kadra for a photo. A stranger on a bus shouts out the window that women should not be running but the familiar shopkeeper smiles and says, bon courage — keep going.
Kadra’s mother doesn’t think she is unusual; she simply loves her daughter. If running is what her Kadra wants, then running is what her mother and her siblings want for her. Isn’t that what family does? “Did Ayanleh give birth to winning? Was he born a winner?” Fadouma asks. “No. He had to work hard to get there. He worked and worked and brought success, and Kadra can do that, too.”
“I can,” Kadra says. “I can train as hard as he does. Even harder.”
Ayanleh trains in the altitude and cool weather of Ethiopia but Kadra wants to keep training in Djibouti. “I want people to see that they can be the best while living in Djibouti, at home. That’s how people will see that running is a good thing, that everyone can do it.” She is determined, too, to not be distracted by a boyfriend or by the petty rivalries that sometimes invade the running clubs in Djibouti. “When you are focused on a work, a straight road, and the medal is at the end, don’t turn off the road,” she says. “Go straight. That’s my plan.”
I asked what she would like to tell the world. “I would say, Djibouti is here. It is a country and it is like this. We have our flag and dances and music and culture and clothes. I want to show what our country is like.”
There will, potentially, be an Indian Ocean Junior Championship hosted in Djibouti in December 2015 that Kadra could participate in. The event was originally scheduled for a year ago but was postponed. She may, or may not, be sent to races in other countries, also. She may, or may not, qualify or be chosen to race in the 2016 Olympics. There are no guarantees. Kadra knows this and presses on.
Insha Allah, if God is willing, the Djiboutian flag will be raised over her head and she will point a finger to the sky. Number one.
Kadra walks me back through the village to my car. We pass goats munching on scraps of food dumped outside a restaurant and a camel stands in the wadi up ahead, regal and still, a crow perched on its hump. The Islamic call to prayer begins and Kadra turns to go home, to wash and pray. This is Djibouti. These are her people, and they are proud of her, too.
They shout her name, call out greetings, ask whether or not she will train today: Children roaming the streets in the afternoon lull between school sessions. Men in macwiises, traditional Somali sarongs, standing outside teashops. Women in brightly colored headscarves, sitting in the wooden green stalls that advertise khat for sale. Little girls who suck on bags of frozen sugar water. She answers each one, like Ayanleh does in the city.
