Nadia Nadim: The Afghani Part-Time Medical Student, Footballer, and Full-Time Role Model
The Afghan-Danish superwoman, Nadia Nadim, is 33 years old. As a child, she faced the loss of her father by the Taliban. After fleeing to Denmark with her family, Nadia created a life of her own. She always had something to say and share with the world as her journey took her to many places; from refugee camps to football to medicine to language studies. With a memoir published in French, Nadia is a living legend at 33.
At a young age living in a refugee camp in Denmark after leaving Afghanistan, she was only trying to survive. “The only thing I was thinking of was staying alive, you know, surviving until the next day,” Nadia told CNN Sport. That led her to do a lot of charity work when she was old enough. Nadia does charity work and ambassadorial work for the UN. Her latest collaboration was with PSG and KLABU; that is a charity that builds sports clubs in refugee camps around the world. This partnership is meant to reach 10,000 refugee children through sports.
Nadim discovered her love for football in the camp where she was staying, and hasn’t stopped loving it ever since. Today, she’s a professional football player and has scored almost 200 goals in her career. She’s played in Portland Thorns, Manchester City, and Paris Saint-Germain. Nadim represented the Danish national team 98 times, and this landed her on the Forbes list of Most Powerful Women in International Sports.
That being said, she has also studied in medical school and has been training to be a reconstructive surgeon. That’s with the knowledge that a career in football is sure to end at some time in the near future. On the side, she studies and learns languages, making her fluent in 11 languages.
The next time you try to think of a superwoman to present to your kids as a model, make sure you remember Nadia Nadim.
