adminBATTAMBANG. — 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 unexploded landmines claim new victims every week but 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 bout 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,” explained Sieng Sokchan, the team’s 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 weapon.
“They look down on us disabled people as incapable of doing anything or of working — or they feel ashamed when they go out because they have a disabled kid or relative.”
Many of the players had little confidence when they started, she explained. But sport has helped to change that — and has also affected the way 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, breaking out into a grin.
Three decades of war has left impoverished Cambodia awash with mines. And while significant steps have been taken to clear unexploded ordnance in the last decade, the country still has one of the world’s highest proportion of amputees. — AFP.
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