"Maryan Hashi remembers the thoughts running through her mind when she began hitting the ski slopes in northern Sweden. As a Black woman from Somalia, she felt like an alien. Am I wearing the correct clothing for this? Does it fit? Do I look weird? Am I snowboarding correctly? Do they think it's weird I'm on the slope? she said. But I carried on I felt if I didn't, I was never going to commit to anything in my life."
"A few years later, snowboarding is the 30-year-old student's big passion and it is helping her integrate into her adopted country's society better than she could ever have imagined. What she'd love now is to see other migrants experiencing the same joy. Immigration from Africa and the Middle East has transformed the demographics of Europe in recent decades. And while the growing diversity is reflected in many sports such as soccer, it hasn't made a dent in winter sports."
Maryan Hashi, a 30-year-old Somali-born student, began snowboarding in northern Sweden feeling like an outsider but persisted and found the sport became her passion and eased her integration. She hopes other migrants can share the same joy. Immigration from Africa and the Middle East has significantly changed European demographics, with about 2 million of Sweden's 10 million residents born abroad. Despite growing diversity in sports like soccer, winter sports remain overwhelmingly white. Sweden's Winter Olympic team is almost entirely ethnically Swedish, mirroring similarly homogenous rosters across France, Germany and Switzerland, unlike the United States' more diverse delegation.
Read at www.mercurynews.com
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