Geographies of Gender and Embodiment in Sport for Development Work

The Gendered Body in “Aidland”

In recent years, the study of the social world of development and conflict resolution specialists has grown exponentially with the ideas of “Aidland” (Apthorpe, 2011) and “Peaceland” (Auteserre, 2014) being commonly used, and much debated, in the field. Importantly, the “land” in each of these terms is not a geographical reference, but rather is used as “a metaphorical concept” to make the point that “the lives and worlds of both those who are ‘doing development’ and those ‘being developed’ play a role in the process of programme implementation” (Franklin, 2012, p. 272). Building upon and extending Raymond Apthorpe’s (2005) concept of “Aidland,” an emerging genre of writing is focusing attention on “the lives, motivations, and personalities” of development professionals, treating them as “an object of inquiry in their own right, rather than primarily the vehicles for the creation and implementation of policy” (Fechter & Hindman, 2011; Harrison, 2013, p. 263; Mosse, 2011; Roth, 2015).

While Aidland studies do provide an important corrective to “more depersonalized accounts of aid-as-machine” (Harrison, 2013, p. 267), concerns have been raised that too many accounts of “doing development” on the ground continue to ignore the embodied experiences of individuals, unwilling or unable to “explore the extent to which desire, fear, hope and awe are produced by, and are producers of, humanitarian space and objects” (Heathershaw, 2016). Of course, both recipients of aid as well as aid and development workers are caught up in these dynamics (Heathershaw, 2016; Smirl, 2012) with radically divergent effects on bodies, subjectivities, and livelihoods within different spaces and places of development.

While the bodies of development professionals as they work, socialize and play within and across development geographies have garnered less attention within Aidland literature, feminist development scholars are increasingly exploring the gendered embodied experiences of women in the sector. Herein embodiment is understood within the feminist framework that informs this work, broadly referring to “the centrality of the body as a site of identification and experience” (Partis-Jennings, 2019, p. 181; also see; Väyrynen, 2019). Below we provide an overview of three key approaches that feminist scholars have drawn upon to advance understandings of women's embodied experiences of development work; memoirs, autobiography, and interviews.

Feminist scholars have drawn upon memoirs as valuable sites for exploring the gendered body and experiences of embodiment within contexts of conflict and development (e.g., Dyvik, 2016; Read, 2018; Watson, 2016). For example, in an examination of Chasing Misery (Hoppe, 2014) – a collection of essays by female aid workers – Read (2018) aptly explores “embodied difference” in humanitarianism and peacebuilding. Read (2018) recognizes the challenges of understanding and representing embodiment, but argues that humanitarian memoirs “can help us to explore the embodied racialized and gendered experiences of aid in conflict” (p. 302). Critically reading the memoirs with a focus on the body and embodiment, she reveals the women's feelings of “passing” as aid workers, and how they embodied gender in ways that were always relational to imagined “real” aid workers (Read, 2018, p. 300). In reading the stories through a double lens of “flesh witnessing” and “passing,” Read (2018, p. 301) presents difference as relational and embodied. Understanding difference “as a gendered relation of power,” she identifies the female aid worker as “always Other, even in her own account”: “different, and separated, both from those populations she is attempting to assist and from her life ‘back home’, searching for the authenticity of experience’ in a field where it is still commonly (and mistakenly) assumed that most aid workers are male” (Read, 2018, p. 311).

Others are making important contributions to feminist scholarship on the body and embodiment in humanitarian, conflict and development work through autobiographical writings and reflections. For example, in her book Intimate Colonialism, Charlés (2007) offers a candid autoethnographic account of her experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in the East African nation of Togo. A Hispanic-American woman in her mid-30s at the time, Charlés' (2007) reflections highlight some of the many embodied tensions she experienced between her Western worldviews of feminism and sexuality with culturally specific forms of sensuality in Togo. Another example is in Martini and Jauhola's (2014) collaborative exploration of their personal experiences in two postdisaster contexts. In presenting a dialogue between two autobiographical stories from their development aid work in Aceh, Indonesia, and Haiti, the authors “explore themes of mobility, temporality, intersections of class, gender and ‘whiteness’” within the materiality and spatiality of aid work (Martini & Jauhola, 2014, p. 76).

Another key approach being used to gain rich understandings of the embodied experiences of women “doing development” is through interviews, often contextualized within periods of fieldwork. For example, in her ethnographic study of a group of Western women development workers living in Gilgit, northern Pakistan, Cook (2007) combines interviews with her own lived experience in this community to reveal the international women's efforts to construct comfortable lives and identities for themselves, and the political consequences of their actions. Inspired by “a concern to think through my own complicity” (Cook, 2007, p. 2) as a Western tourist and researcher in Pakistan, she offers an incredibly rich and nuanced account of the many ways Western women workers made meaning of their lives in this community. Focusing on the processes of subjectivity formation, Cook (2007) highlights the ways the Western women “perpetuate, legitimate, resist, and transform relations of domination” as they imagine themselves in relation to the people among whom they live and work (p. 6).

Elsewhere Cook (2005) draws upon this same project to explore the significance of clothing choices to the “formation of western women's subjectivities and to the transcultural power relations in this post-colonial setting” (p. 351). While many of the women in Cook's (2005) study devised ways to “rationalize and manage” wearing the local attire (shalwar kameez), she observes that the “bodily shame, lack of autonomy, and cultural ‘backwardness’ supposedly implied by a woman's head-coverings are attitudes even most cultural sympathizers are unwilling to accept as part of their identity in Gilgit” (p. 365). In so doing, she extends literature on the coloniality of Western attitudes toward veiling practices (e.g., Jiwani & Dakroury, 2009; Razack, 2008), to reveal dominant discourses of race, culture and imperialism being perpetuated through the everyday clothing practices of Western development workers in local contexts. Drawing upon research with Canadian women development workers in Africa, Heron (2007) also makes an important contribution to exploring such embodied practices and understandings of the self as critical to the “politics of accountability.” Across these works, it becomes clear that creating space for the voices and embodied lived experiences of international women working in contexts of development provides valuable insights into their (conscious and unconscious) understandings of relationality and difference. These understandings take shape at the intersection of global power relations, local gendered regimes and social hierarchies, and inevitably impact women's relationships and work.

Embodying Gender in the SDP Industry

SDP is perhaps uniquely positioned under the Aidland umbrella. For example, SDP researchers have examined the motivations and experiences of staff and volunteers, some of whom work (or have worked) across a range of other development and/or aid organizations. Scholars have increasingly considered various aspects of work experiences within SDP organizations (see, for example, Gallant, Sherry, & Nicholson, 2015; Lyras & Welty Peachey, 2011; MacIntosh, Couture, & Spence, 2015; Shilbury, Sotiriadou, & Green, 2008). In particular, Welty Peachey and colleagues have engaged in a range of projects focused on leadership (Welty Peachey & Burton, 2017) and the motives, retention factors, and rewards of volunteers (Welty Peachey, Borland, Lobpries, & Cohen, 2015; Welty Peachey, Welty Peachey, Lyras, Cohen, Bruening, & Cunningham, 2014) in the field of SDP. In so doing, their findings draw many parallels with literature in Aidland studies more broadly, including largely overlooking issues of gender in development work. However, a key distinction evident in this work is that many SDP workers and volunteers have a passion for sport, and/or particular skill sets associated with sport or physical activities, often with the assumption that they can help make the world better through offering improved access and opportunities to the sports that gave them so much at critical stages in their own lives.

With critical scholars increasingly questioning the assumptions underpinning the SDP movement, some are examining the assumptions of staff and volunteers and how these are navigated in the field. For example, focusing particularly on the experiences of volunteer interns of SDP organizations from a sociocultural perspective, Darnell (2010) described a tendency to interpret difference as “markers of underdevelopment” which worked to sustain the neoliberal focus of development (p. 396). As Hartmann and Kwauk (2011) note, if any development is to be accomplished through SDP programming then projects must be aware that “sport-based development workers have a double-burden: They must offer successful athletic activities [programmes using sport and/or physical activities] as well as operate sophisticated, self-conscious development programming” (p. 290).

Despite a growing body of literature in management studies and sociology of sport on volunteer and staff experiences in the field of SDP – and the ‘double burden’ of this work – women's experiences of volunteering and working for SDP organizations have been given much less attention (for exceptions, see Darnell, 2010; Thorpe & Chawansky, 2017). Important feminist work, however, has focused on the embodied experiences of women SDP researchers in the field. For example, Caudwell (2007), Hillyer (2010) and Chawansky (2015) have all written about the emotional, embodied and political complexities of working in SDP spaces (also see Chapter 2). In this chapter we build upon and extend such literature by bringing the contributions of feminist development scholars into dialogue with geographers of development to explore how the gendered body (of women workers) is lived within and across local spaces of SDP. In so doing, we hope this approach facilitates new considerations and reflections as to what such everyday embodied experiences might tell us about the gendered power relations within SDP, and development and humanitarianism more broadly.

The “Embodied Geopolitics” of Western Women in Afghanistan

To date, a few feminist scholars have explored the corporeal experiences of those (local and international staff) working in development spaces in Afghanistan. Fluri (2011) examined “the embodied geopolitics” in Afghanistan by way of “gender roles and relations” among and between international workers and Afghan recipients of international aid and development (p. 519). In examining the bodily experiences of male and female international staff, alongside those of Afghans implicated and involved in processes of development and aid work, Fluri (2011) offers a critical reading of corporeality based on gender, dress, mobility and sexuality. She explores the body as a contested site that reinforces, challenges, resists and reformulates notions of modernity and tradition following the US invasion of Afghanistan. More recently, Partis-Jennings (2019) draws upon interviews with female international humanitarian actors in Afghanistan to examine their “experiences of performing their gender in hybridized ways” (p. 178). According to Partis-Jennings (2019), postconflict Afghanistan was a very important context in which to explore “how gender threads through the everyday praxis of peacebuilding” (p. 180). Throughout her interviews, many of the foreign women discussed their experiences of difference (as not entirely male or female) containing a “complex uncertainty that was both gendered and racialised”:

The interaction between some concept of “foreign” and some concept of the “female” played out as a site of friction in which “porous boundaries” between different notions of woman were marked by distinctions between foreign and local bodies in terms of differential freedom and access.

(p. 185)

To explain these context-specific experiences of positionality, Partis-Jennings (2019) adapted the concept of “third gender,” which she refers to as “a kind of embodied, performed hybridity.” As she makes clear, such experiences of gender are firmly located within the Afghan context: “perceived gendered expectations of Afghanistan are mixed with the bodies, behaviors and expectations of international women to form something that contains gendered elements of masculinity, femininity, the ‘illiberal’ and the liberal social orders” (p. 183). Partis-Jennings’ (2019) work has many important parallels with the findings of this study.

In the remainder of this chapter we engage in dialogue with feminist literature on embodiment and geographical understandings of development, and the empirical material from the interviews with international women working in Afghanistan. The following discussion consists of three main parts. First, we explain how the women SDP workers experienced their Western bodies in public spaces (particularly streets and markets), including managing eye contact, clothing choices, and responses to various forms of harassment and assault. Second, we offer a brief discussion of the significance of the gendered, moving, sporting body inside and outside of the NGO facilities, and how the Sport for Youth building became a “bubble” for the women in this study. Across these parts we reveal the various ways these women experienced and managed their Western gendered moving bodies within and across work- and nonwork-related public spaces. Finally, we consider how such experiences of embodiment prompted highly reflexive and, in some cases, critical feminist understandings of SDP work in Afghanistan and beyond.

The Gaze and the Female SDP Worker as “Spectacle”

Another theme that emerged from our analysis was how the women experienced and navigated the “male gaze” in public spaces, particularly in the streets and market places. As Garland-Thomson (2005) writes:

Staring witnesses an intrusive interest on the part of the starer and thrusts an uneasy attention on the object of the stare. At once transgressive and intimate…. staring is thus a kind of potent social choreography that marks bodies by enacting a dynamic visual exchange between a spectator and a spectacle.

(p. 31)

Recognizing the power in the gaze, feminist scholars have long articulated the normative heterosexual male gaze (e.g., Dolan, 1988), and postcolonial scholars have identified the problematics of the colonializing gaze (e.g., Kaplan, 1997). As foreign women working in Afghanistan, each of our participants felt the presence of the gaze. For example, Joanne explains:

Just driving around town, I definitely got some very, very leery looks… there is a weird feeling of exposure just being a woman in public space in Afghanistan, where you feel very on display in a way that's very sexualized, especially being a foreign woman.

Another participant also acknowledged the constant presence of the gaze, but did not experience it in sexual terms: “The eyes are always there. I felt like I had eyes on me all the time, but for me it wasn't necessarily sexual all the time, it was often very curious” (Tess).

According to Partis-Jennings (2017), the combination of “a perceived patriarchal context” with “security routines… which rely on hypermasculine signifiers” works to “create and perpetuate the conditions in which the female (for both internationals and Afghans) is marked with insecurity” (p. 411). In this context of female insecurity, one of our participants described developing her own gaze as a coping strategy, directing her sight away from hypermasculine symbols of war and toward objects of beauty:

Of course I saw the weapon, but I tried to focus on other things. I think weapons are very powerful things – they draw your attention and they scare you, but that's amplifying the power. Instead, I tried to focus on the balloon person or the woman who was wearing these amazing shoes on the horrible dirt roads. I was trying to focus on these things as a coping mechanism.

(Marie)

Some of our participants also spoke about navigating eye contact in ways that minimize feelings of being “out of place”: “I try my best not to look at people because I could technically pass as Afghan, but most people can tell that I am not in the way that I dress and comport myself” (Joanne). While some tried to navigate eye contact – directing their gaze down and away from others – in their efforts to “pass” as Afghan, or at least, not to feel so “out of place,” clothing was another important element in how the Western women negotiated their bodies in public spaces.

Clothing and Covering

For Afghan women in public spaces, clothing tends to be loose fitting and with the headscarf (hijab), with some wearing the chadori and burqa. According to Fluri (2011), Afghan dress for women provides “spatial privacy to the body”; “it visually identifies the covered body as a private space that is not for public view (by men outside one's kinship group)” (p. 523). Continuing, she explains that both international workers and Afghan women in her study wore clothing that primarily covered the body, but “covering the head/hair remained a much more politically charged and contentious issue” (Fluri, 2011, p. 523). Similar to the Western women working in northern Pakistan in Cook's (2005) study, some of the international women workers in Fluri's (2011) project were adamant about not wearing a headscarf in order “to preserve their personal identity, autonomy and in many cases to ‘model’ alternative forms of dress” (p. 523). However, choosing not to cover as a way of “setting an example” is idealizing the Western feminine position as normative (Fluri, 2011, p. 523), or worse, culturally superior (Cook, 2005). But as Kabeer (1994) and Parpart (1995, 2009) and colleagues (Parpart, Rai, & Staudt, 2002), remind us, it is important to explore the nuances of resistance, agency, voice, and embodied lived experience in gendered development work.

In contrast to the clothing practices of Western women in research by Cook (2005) and Fluri (2011), all of the women in our project wore the headscarf at all times in public spaces and within their organizational facilities. Some mentioned initial tensions in wearing the headscarf similar to concerns raised by women in previous work (Cook, 2005; Fluri, 2011), but even while acknowledging that it wasn't part of their cultural identity, most came to respect and even enjoy wearing it. For example, Joanne explained:

Wearing a headscarf is not part of my identity, but it is part of my ancestral culture. Going in wearing the headscarf, it just felt like I was participating and following the etiquette of the society that I was living in. Initially, I felt impartial to wearing a headscarf, and I then grew to like it. It became a security blanket and I really missed it after that… having something to cover my face with when I was making uncomfortable eye contact or things like that.

Embracing the headscarf as a “security blanket” to avoid the male gaze and uncomfortable eye contact was similar to some of the international women in previous studies that also identified the headscarf as “a necessary form of dress in order to avoid stares or verbal harassment in public space” (Cook, 2005; Fluri, 2011, p. 523).

Many of the participants in our project purchased Afghan clothing for themselves shortly upon arrival. For example, Marie recalls: “I bought my clothes in Kabul, so in that way I was also feeling more local.” Continuing, however, she notes that despite such efforts, she could never disguise herself as an Afghan woman (despite wanting to at times) because bodies are carefully read for all signs and symbols of identity, belonging, and difference. Despite such efforts, Marie knew that others “could notice I was foreign by the way I walk, because my steps had more energy than an Afghan woman, like more certainty.”

Other culturally specific corporeal subtleties were observed, with some modifying adornment practices. For example, some opted to wear wedding rings: “On my first day we went shopping for Afghan clothes and a wedding ring. I often pretended to be married to save a lot of hassle” (Anna). Another removed her glasses to avoid particular readings of her body: “I didn't wear my glasses in public. There was this tendency that women with glasses appeared to be western and slutty” (Ruby). In these small examples of the corporeal awareness and decisions being made by the women, we see how much cultural knowledge is obtained in and through the body, and how the women sought to navigate cultural body codes with some levels of cultural sensitivity both out of respect for the society in which they were living and working, but also to minimize risk to their own personal safety.

In sum, clothing is an “embodied set of cultural codes,” and thus “a vital part of performing subjectivity and enacting power” (Cook, 2005, p. 357). In contrast to the Western women in research by Cook (2005) and Fluri (2011), however, the participants in this study are not “forg[ing] ambivalent and conflicted subjectivities in relation to indigenous Muslim women as they perpetuate and resist accepted logocentric imperial thinking” (p. 366). Rather, they are giving careful consideration to their clothing choices and trying to find ways to embody cultural norms and values in respectful ways. In discussing their clothing practices, there were no comments that suggested the assumed superiority of Western clothing. Arguably, this example highlights differences from the Western women workers in previous research, particularly regarding their relational positioning to Afghan women. This case also highlights the need to critically examine how underlying relations of neocolonial power impact SGD programs. Such analyses are imperative for uncovering how notions of “salvation” and “solidarity” influence and are embedded (and embodied) in Global North/South relations.

Assault and Bodies “out of Place”

As a growing body of industry reports demonstrate, women working in development and aid contexts experience high levels of physical and sexual abuse both inside and outside of their organizations (Costello, 2018; Norbert, 2017; Spencer, 2018). Despite a number of reports documenting the prevalence of sexual harassment in Aidland, few studies (if any) have focused on women's embodied experiences of such events within particular spaces, or how they respond and make meaning of such incidents in specific cultural, work- and nonwork-related contexts.

For the women in this study, the streets were a place that held particularly high risk, with all of the women experiencing versions of sexual assault:

There were a few occasions where I was in a market and wasn't close enough to a male colleague and I was groped. … Things of that nature felt very unsettling and felt violating and aggressive.

(Ruby)

One time a man intentionally bumped into me in the marketplace and grabbed my bottom. The [Afghan] male colleague I was with handled it in a very Afghan way where he very discreetly picked up a knife from the local butcher and very calmly whisper threatened him. Then a crowd started to form and we walked away as quickly as we could.

(Joanne)

Some of the initial volunteers recalled a number of incidents in which they were given a clear message (i.e., tomatoes being thrown, grabbing) that they did not belong in particular male-defined public spaces:

This is the general feeling I had over the whole time I was there, even when going to the small cities outside of Kabul. But I was grabbed two times. One time I had tomatoes thrown at me while [skating] on the street. I was with a couple of kids and [a male staff member] from Australia, but he looked a little bit Afghan. There was a couple of times for example when I used to go to buzkashi, which is a horse riding game, and also a football match. Also I went to a holiday spot and there was grabbed on my arse. One guy came to me, grabbed me around the waist, everybody was laughing and I was like what do we do now. I ran behind them once and wanted to hit them and they got super scared.

(Hazel)

Through such experiences, it became clear that actively participating in sporting activities (i.e., doing action sports outdoors) and attending sporting events were not appropriate for Afghan or foreign women alike. It is worth noting that the examples offered by Hazel were not common across our interviewees. As one of the first international volunteers working for Sport for Youth, Hazel recalled initially enjoying the adventure of living and working in Afghanistan and embracing opportunities to do action sports and enjoy other social activities (i.e., buzkashi, football) in public outdoor spaces. However, such opportunities were not available to other women staff that joined the NGO later, when more risk avoidance strategies were put in place. In this way, some of the early women staff of Sport for Youth learned the unspoken cultural and gender rules through trial and error in outdoor public spaces, with this knowledge subsequently shaping formal and informal organizational policy.

In their responses to incidents of assault in public spaces, each of the women took into consideration their own cultural assumptions and embraced local recommendations as how best to act:

I had my ass grabbed several times. We were advised to get angry and shout swear words in Dari. This was the best response for me. It worked and the men laughed but ran away. There was no such system as going to the police.

(Marie)

The understanding that there is “no such system” for reporting (both with the authorities and within their organizations) is a common reason women aid and development workers give for not reporting sexual assault (Humanitarian Women's Network, 2015). Other participants explained some of the cultural negotiations and considerations that they went through following an assault, and in preparing for the next:

At the time, I felt it was important to behave as much as possible as the Afghan females around me. To not make a fuss and to not be different, because of security issues. I did not want to get any attention on me, and just wanted to be safe and not noticed.

(Tess)

What I tried to do was not react like I might in the western world. I also tried to not judge myself in that moment as a western person because, of course, I have those rules in my head. I come from a western society where women, most of the time, are nearly treated equally as the men. I tried not to judge myself on my feminist values from the western world because everything is very different in Kabul.

(Marie)

In such comments, we see parallels with the work of Fluri (2011) where she reveals there are “territorial and corporeal tensions between ‘universal’ discourses of human rights and ‘Western’ embodiments of sexual harassment and violence” (p. 531). Continuing, she explains that such tensions illustrate “the fissures and fractures of these ‘universal’ paradigms that at one geopolitical scale attempt to project moral superiority while at the scale of human interaction often counter these assumed moralities” (Fluri, 2011, p. 532). For our participants, experiences of sexual harassment prompted some highly reflexive (re)considerations of their own positioning in Afghanistan as Western development workers, as well as raising questions about their own understandings of women's rights that are not universal but rather located within specific sociocultural geographies.

Importantly, some of our participants took care to make disclaimers surrounding their experiences of sexual assault in public spaces. One woman explained that, while some Afghan men might grab women in public spaces as a way of reinforcing that they are “out of place,” most of the Afghan men that she worked with treated her with “respect and empathy”: “Most of the Afghan men I encountered were very kind, respectful and supportive to me” (Marie). Herein, we see participants refusing to accept the “pathologised image of the Afghan man” as a dangerous misogynist that has come to dominate the mainstream Western imaginary (Manchanda, 2015, p. 130). Another of our participants commented: “From my observations, these situations happen to Afghan women more often, or just as often, as to western women. Some of my Afghan female friends never left the house without an umbrella to hit potential gropers” (Ruby). This comment reflects a common theme of the Western women recognizing the agency of Afghan women, and learning from their strategies to safely access and negotiate public spaces. Some were also careful not to consider such offences out of context, or to reinforce problematic binaries of the “west” treating women well, and Afghanistan treating women poorly: “Of course it was uncomfortable [getting grabbed], but it happens here too [in Europe]. I had my butt grabbed on a train here [European city] recently” (Anna). Although subtle, in such comments we see participants resisting problematic “war on terror” narratives that positioned Afghan women as needing saving, and the West as the most suitable savior because of their enlightened gender relations (Kandiyoti, 2007a, 2007b; Wibben, 2016).

As reported in various feminist accounts of the abuses women experience in Aidland, many professional women development and aid workers (learn to) accept sexual assault as part of their work in high-risk or developing contexts. While such discussions have not been on the agenda in SDP, this was certainly the case among our participants, with one woman noting quite matter-of-factly: “I'm lucky I did not get raped or kidnapped, only groped, ignored and insulted for being a woman.” It is common in the development and aid sector for such experiences to be normalized by both men and women within NGOs. One of our participants expressed her concerns to a senior Western woman colleague after her first experience of being physically accosted in a market, only to have the woman laugh and tell her to “get used to it” (Hazel). Another commented: “With the western women I talked about this with, the attitude was, ‘stop making a fuss and get on with it. There is nothing you can do anyway and there are much more important things to get on with’” (Sandra).

This rationale is common in the sector where the “real work” (e.g., reducing poverty, educating children, empowering women) is much more important than individualized assaults on women's bodies. Others sought advice from their Afghan friends and colleagues, many of whom adopted practical responses: “With the older Afghan women who I spoke with about this, they had the attitude that nothing can be done, so just get on with it. We need to survive! Cook food or take care of the kids” (Marie). Each of our participants had experienced some type of sexual harassment while in the streets, but all were highly resistant to painting a picture of victimhood in the context of Afghanistan. Their experiences were always understood as relational to those of their Afghan female colleagues and friends (“these situations happen to Afghan women more often,” Ruby), other countries that they had traveled to (“Afghanistan wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be, I found Egypt so much worse in terms of men harassing me on the street,” Sandra), as well as their “home” countries (“It happens here too,” Anna). The volunteers and staff “resistance to painting victimhood” in the context of Afghanistan was both a point of (informal) discussion among Sport for Youth staff, as well as something that was experientially learned during their time in Afghanistan.