Zarmina Nekzai isn’t exactly your typical Canadian hockey mom. Nekzai grew up in a village near Kabul. She fled Afghanistan 30 years ago and now calls Canada home. The hockey mom has made it her mission to bring her love of the game to the place she grew up. She says most of the children had never even played with a ball before. "They never had a different kind of shoes on their feet. That’s why I started with the rollerblades, give them some clue how they could stand it. And we showed them all the movies." The kids learned to rollerblade through you-tube videos and this winter they will try ice skates for the first time. Nekzai has turned an empty field into a hockey rink. Her dream is to build rinks all across Afghanistan to push children to go to school. “If they are not at school, they couldn’t join the sport program. The sport makes them come to school.” All proceeds from a book she wrote, Hockey Girls of Kabul, go to support the program.
