I lived in Virginia for a few years growing up. We lived in a beautiful modern home, and it had an open floorplan connecting the kitchen, breakfast area, and family room. The family room had beautiful wood floors and a cathedral ceiling (an upstairs balcony allowed people to look down from the upstairs below into the family room). A huge stone fireplace rested against one wall, with a pair of glass doors on either side of the fireplace that led to the deck. One of the nicest things about that house was that I could sit in the family room and talk to my mom while she cooked dinner in the kitchen around 6 o'clock, and she would always play cds on the stereo, usually the Beatles, but sometimes Bonnie Raitt or Steely Dan. That's when I fell in love with the Beatles. I remember sitting on the wood floor listening to the Beatles and thinking, "I wouldn't want to be anyone else in the world." And it was true--I thought about all the kids I could have been born, all the girls around the world in Chinese villages or arid, impoverished deserts that I could have been, and I was so grateful at being so lucky.

That's when an article like the one recently featured in the New York Times about Nike creating a sportier version of the hijab for Somalian refugees in Kenya surprisingly shakes me. Surprisingly, because it's really just a fluff, life-interest type story, but it's so shockingly different from my reality that I have to take notice. The article is about a group of young women--early twenties it seems--who like to keep themselves occupied by playing volleyball. The girls have to wear the hijab, which completely covers their bodies, even in 100 degree heat. But it's not the heat that bothers them so much as all the fabric getting in the way.

"Some people think that if girls play sports they are prostitutes," Ms. Ibrahim said. "Our parents were embarrassed. They had bad feelings about girls playing outside."

. . . .

Life is particularly challenging for girls, who rarely attend school, marry early and then spend their days struggling to feed their many children. Girls in the refugee camps go to school at a significantly higher rate than those whose families remain in war-ravaged Somalia, 58 percent here compared to 7 percent back home, but their lives are still dismal, at best. "Refugee life is very difficult," Ms. Ibrahim said during a break in a volleyball game. "We're away from our motherland. It's like being in prison."

On the volleyball court, however, girls say their troubles fade away for a while. They say they have no time to worry what clan the girl next to them or across the net might be. They also have no time to think about the man their parents might be arranging for them to marry or the work that awaits them when the match is over.

To quote that Jenny Lewis song that keeps going through my head, "There but for the grace of God go I."