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Women’s-Only Swim Class Aims to Help Get Refugees, Immigrants in Shape

Patty Wight
/
Maine Public
Taysir Jama (left), a swim class participant and community outreach specialist at the YWCA, and Natalie Bornstein, social justice and advocacy manager at the YWCA.

Exercise is something that most of us don’t get enough of. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, about 80 percent of Americans fail to meet the recommended guidelines for physical activity.

As challenging as it can be to squeeze in time for exercise, for some in this country, the obstacle is more about culture. In Lewiston, the YWCA is helping refugees and immigrants overcome health hurdles by offering a women’s-only swim class, part of a wider effort to improve the health of new Mainers and help them prevent chronic disease.

If you want to find Rahma Elmi on a Saturday afternoon, it’s a pretty safe bet you’ll find her clutching a kickboard and splashing her way through the swimming pool at the YWCA in Lewiston.

“I cannot miss my class,” she says. “It’s like my med. It’s a part of my med. I can’t miss it.”

Swimming may be must-have medicine for Elmi now, but until recently, it wasn’t an option. Elmi, from Djibouti, practices Islam and wears a headscarf in keeping with her religion’s dress code, which can make swimming in a public pool a challenge.

“For religion purposes, I cannot. I cannot take out my scarf in the presence of other man, except those who are in my family circle,” she says.

There are a lot of other women like Elmi in the Lewiston-Auburn area who face barriers to exercise options that most Americans wouldn’t blink twice at. Natalie Bornstein of the YWCA says her organization recognized the problem a couple of years ago after a Somali Muslim woman told staff that she wished she could swim.

“We obviously said, ‘You’re welcome to swim any time.’ And she said, ‘I can’t. Because there’s this huge viewing window, I’m not comfortable being in the pool with men, and this is just not a place that’s going to work for me,’” Bornstein says.

So the YWCA designated two hours every Saturday as a women’s-only swim class. They hang curtains over the viewing windows for privacy, and any woman — new or native Mainer — is welcome to swim for a suggested $2 donation.

During a recent class, about half a dozen women swim in the pool. Some wear burkinis, swimsuits that cover the body and head. A couple of women wear traditional swimsuits, and others, including Elmi, wear a T-shirt and pants.

The hope is that by providing a comfortable place for these women to exercise, they will be able to prevent health problems such as diabetes and high blood pressure. Those are common conditions for all Americans, but can be more prevalent among minority groups, according to the CDC.

Fowsia Musse of Healthy Androscoggin, an organization that supports the swim class through a CDC grant, says immigrants from countries such as Somalia undergo major lifestyle changes when they move to Maine.

“We went from very active life and healthy, organic, to not so healthy life and no exercise at all,” she says.

In Somalia, Musse says, cars are a luxury and the primary mode of transportation is walking. Many Somalis also grow their own food. When they come to Maine, she says, they rely more on cars and often eat more processed foods.

“Over time, you see a woman who arrived a few months ago, and very different weight six months later,” she says.

Elmi says she started swimming to get more fit and to help her left knee, which used to hurt so much she couldn’t bend or sit down.

“But now, since I practice in the gym and the water, oh my goodness, I take back my life,” she says.

When Elmi started the class about a year and a half ago, she didn’t know how to swim. But on this day, for the first time, she swims the width of the pool on her own, without a kickboard.

Elmi victoriously punches her fists in the air as her teacher Susan Peck cheers. Peck says in the class, both participants and teachers learn from each other.

“I teach them swimming, but they teach me stuff about the culture that I never knew,” she says.

And this swim class has led the YWCA to expand its multicultural exercise options. They now offer a walking group, after swimmers asked for a class in which they could socialize more.