When Yemen’s war started in 2015, Salim[1] was 54 and had spent decades building a comfortable life for his wife and five children. They lived in a spacious, two-level house with a garden in one of the country’s most progressive cities, where Salim worked as a teacher and a real estate agent. Just one year later, that city was hardly recognizable and intensifying conflict forced them to leave what was left of that life behind as they fled to Sana’a for safety.
“The pain of displacement is being deprived of everything you own and facing harsh circumstances that you can’t adapt to,” says Salim. “When we arrived, there was no electricity or water in Sana’a and no basic services. Most people lost their income and have been without it for the last eight years—so most Yemenis have had to sell all their valuables to survive.”
As an Internally Displaced Person (IDP), Salim has spent the last seven years like most Yemenis—with hardship pressing in. Also like many Yemenis, he has faced the emptiness of a life narrowed to wartime subsistence by turning to humor and passing around jokes on social media. However, there are limits to the resilience that anecdotes can sustain, and with each passing year Salim has found it harder to get up in the morning. That is, until this May when a friend invited him to join a fitness group that he’d been attending for four months.
When Salim’s friend, a retired professor, explained that the group meets from 5:30 to 6:30 am every morning, Salim was hardly motivated to join. Now 62, Salim felt old, and he didn’t want to make his days any longer by getting up earlier. However, the professor wouldn’t take no for an answer. “He was really after me to join and telling me about how he was benefitting and not getting bored,” says Salim. “I kept imagining how hard it would be for me at my age, but he kept after me to the point that he came to my door early one morning and just waited for me to come out of the house.”
Salim was groggy and still reluctant as the professor took him through the pre-dawn streets that morning to Sana’a’s Unity Sports Club. However, once they arrived Salim was astonished by what he saw. Hundreds of men in their 60s and 70s stood in rows as they enthusiastically followed the directives of a designated trainer leading them through a set of exercises. “When I saw that some of the men were older than me, I was encouraged to join,” says Salim.
The event Salim attended that morning was a monthly gathering of the Best Team initiative, which started in 2017 with the slogan “Fitness for All.” The initiative was born when retired engineer Naji Abu Hatim and his younger friend Abdullah Al Qaidani began leading a group of retirees through light fitness drills at a single site—Sana’a’s Revolution Park.[2] The set of 33 exercises they chose are based in a Swedish Gymnastics routine first developed in the 1800s, which is designed to work the whole body. The founders reviewed the routine that they found online with a former trainer at Yemen’s military college and made adaptations to ensure it would be suitable for Yemen’s seniors. Since then, the initiative has grown to 17 sites and a total of more than 1,500 members. 14 of the sites are in Sana’a, where groups ranging in size from 20 to 300 members meet daily at parks, stadiums, sports clubs, and universities and a veteran member guides the workouts.[3] New members like Salim are encouraged to join a group that meets close to their home, and participation is free with no registration required. “All you have to do is wake up, get dressed, and show up,” says Salim, who joined a group of 20 to 25 members that meets at Sana’a University. “After I did it for five days, I began to notice that I was feeling better and now I don’t let the sun rise without greeting it in high spirits.”
Once a month, participants from all 13 sites of the Best Team initiative come together for a special celebration at a sports club, like the one Salim attended in May. The most recent celebration was held on July 27th at Sana’a’s Al Ahli sports club. These monthly events have become a growing attraction and have inspired similar initiatives in Hajjah and Hodeidah provinces. According to the World Bank, life expectancy in Yemen fell from 68 in 2013, prior to the start of the country’s war, to 64 in 2021.[4] Thus, for the retired professors, doctors, engineers, and other professionals who say they are reclaiming their mental and physical health through the Best Team initiative, it is no small thing to celebrate. “You put down your phone and this hour calms your spirit and energizes your body,” says Salim after participating for over two months. “Of course, I’m exaggerating a little—but now I feel 10 years younger!”
Although most participants are in their 60s and 70s, the initiative is open to Yemeni men of all ages. In some cases, it is bringing together up to three generations of the same family—a retiree, his son, and his grandson. It has also led some members to make other lifestyle changes as they experience relief from the psychological stress of living through conflict. “I’ve noticed that many of the participants have stopped chewing qat[5],” says Salim. “Since qat keeps you up at night, it makes it harder to get up and join the exercises at 5:30 am.”
Meanwhile, Best Team participants have also started organizing other activities, including trash pick-ups in the parks where they meet and hiking and cycling trips in the mountains and valleys outside Sana’a. Trips into nature provide additional mental health benefits that build on the renewal participants are already experiencing through the early morning exercises. Some of the men simply go out for breakfast after they complete their daily fitness routine. The grassroots fitness movement’s growing impact in both numbers and scope is a reminder of the power of activities that combine both physical and social components to improve a person’s connections with himself and his community.
For several years, Salim has been distributing food baskets on behalf of a local non-profit and he has convinced two of the beneficiaries on his food basket list to join the Best Team initiative, too. According to Salim, one of them was suffering from health problems including high blood pressure and diabetes as well as depression. “Ahmed always walked with a cane, and he was just waiting to die,” says Salim, “but after just one week of coming to the morning exercises, he stopped using the cane.”
Salim attributes the rapid improvement that Ahmed experienced to the psychological benefits of the activities. “I think it’s because his self-confidence improved—his spirits—alongside his physical health,” says Salim.
Salim says the other beneficiary from his food basket list who has joined the Best Team initiative was excited as soon as he heard about it. “After I explained it to him and told him how I was benefitting, he came right away,” says Salim. “He’s starting to see a lot of benefits and he’s very committed and says he waits expectantly for 5:30 to come every morning.”
[1] Names changed to protect Yemenis living in the context of war.
[2] https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=239026034881605&id=100035270920158&sfnsn=wa&mibextid=VhDh1V
[3] https://www.positive.news/society/yemen-best-team-sports-club/
[4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=YE
[5] A shrub cultivated in the Middle East and Africa that contains the alkaloid cathinone, a stimulant, which is said to cause excitement, loss of appetite, and euphoria. Chewing the leaves and buds of the shrub has a history as a social custom dating back thousands of years.
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