 About 30 to 40 young people participate in each ski outing, but about an equal number get left behind because there isn’t space for them all. (CBC) |
Spending entire cold winter days outside in the snow has become hugely popular among Ottawa immigrants from hot, sunny Somalia, thanks to a successful community ski program.
“The kids fell in love with it and it took off and it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” said Mohamed Islam, one of the organizers of the program run out of the Somali Centre for Family Services.
Grade 8 student Ahmed Abdullahi was one of the three dozen or so children, teens and young adults who hit the snowy slopes at Vorlage in Wakefield, Que., as part of the most recent outing last Friday.
 ‘It’s the most thrilling sport that I’ve ever tried in my life,’ said Ahmed Abdullahi, who is in Grade 8. (CBC) |
“It’s the most thrilling sport that I’ve ever tried in my life,” he said, grinning from ear-to-ear. It was only his third time skiing, but was already speeding down steepest runs at Vorlage and nearby Mont-Cascades.
Abdullahi was lucky to make it on the yellow school bus that left the Ibn Batouta French Islamic school in Ottawa after Friday prayers.
Too popular
The ski program, which started three years ago, is now so popular that about 30 or 40 children who want to go are left behind each time, said Yusuf Mohamed, who first came up with the idea of organizing the trips. There isn’t enough funding to bring everyone who wants to go.
 Yusuf Mohamed said he started the program to get kids active in the winter. (CBC) |
Despite the program’s success, at the beginning, nobody was excited about the idea, Islam said.
Mohamed admitted he thought it was going to be a hard sell.
“Our community, we don’t do a lot of outdoor stuff in the wintertime because we came from a nice sunny place,” he said.
But he added that local Somali-Canadians know their community suffers from a lot of health problems because of the sedentary, indoor lifestyle they adopt when they come to Canada.
“We figured, ‘You know what? It’s winter, there’s not a lot going on for
