KAYONZA DISTRICT, Rwanda -- In the eastern corner of one of the world's poorest countries, where electricity and running water are luxuries, where the costs of exercise and health care are out of reach, where men are traditionally deemed earners and women are delegated as caretakers, there are, remarkably, a handful of basketball courts where that all falls away. At least for a moment.
The poverty and patriarchy are obscured, as women and girls emerge from their mud-brick houses and march purposefully toward the courts. They're not wearing Air Jordans or, in many cases, even tennis shoes; nor often shorts or T-shirts. Instead, many are enveloped in the traditional kitenge, a sarong-like dress, sporting head scarves and sandals. Their ages range from 10 to 75, and they're playing a sport that many of them had never even heard of until recently.
As the world marks International Women's Day on March 8, far away from Iowa star Caitlin Clark and the looming women's NCAA tournament and WNBA season, basketball has become an inclusive and equalizing force for thousands of Rwandan women and girls whose lives largely had been limited to cooking, cleaning and childcare.
The women say their status has slowly shifted in the 12 years since a Boston-based nonprofit called Shooting Touch poured the cement on its first basketball court in Rwanda.
"The first message that Shooting Touch wants to convey is to show that whatever men are capable of, women are, too," says Diane Amizero, who was 14 when she became one of the first girls to venture onto a Shooting Touch court in Rwanda.
That was not a small step for Diane or the few other girls and women who decided to pick up a basketball. Even exercising can be taboo for women in these villages.
THE IDEA FOR Shooting Touch wasn't originally about empowering women and girls in Rwanda, or even in Boston, where the organization was launched by Lindsey and Justin Kittredge. It was focused on boys.
In 2007, the couple were newlyweds. She worked in real estate, and he worked in sports footwear for Reebok and ran free basketball clinics in South Boston on the weekends. Lindsey had been a Division I lacrosse player at the University of Vermont and "had always wanted to use sports as a catalyst for change to help youth and kids."
Together, they launched an effort to provide affordable and structured basketball clinics and camps for underprivileged kids in Boston.
"Initially, it started off as actually boys-only," Lindsey Kittredge said.
A few years in, Justin connected with a friend who described a fellowship that allowed him to explore ways basketball might create social change and improve the lives of the less fortunate around the world. It seemed like a good enough idea to Lindsey and Justin.
"So very naively, we decided to create what was, at the time, called the Shooting Touch Sabbatical Program," Lindsey said.
Through Reebok and other connections, they raised enough money to give a $25,000 fellowship to a kid fresh out of college. The job: Take basketball to the corners of the globe and create change. They weren't trying to unearth hidden players to feed college programs or the NBA, but simply to do good and improve lives.
For the first few years, the Shooting Touch Fellows bounced from country to country, stopping long enough to establish a connection but not long enough to create a lasting foundation. The first fellow jumped from Brazil to Senegal to Cape Verde. Another spent some time in South Africa and then moved on to Zimbabwe.
"We just realized that it wasn't sustainable for us to keep moving these fellows around the world and dipping their toes into these pools of change and then not putting down program roots," Lindsey said. "... The light bulb went off for us to change the model."
They needed to be in one place. And so in 2012, soon after the two fellowship recipients both happened to choose Rwanda, Shooting Touch set up its permanent international outpost in one of the world's most difficult places.
Rwanda is still largely defined by its devastating genocide of 30 years ago; neighbors killed neighbors, friends killed friends, family members killed family members. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped. At least 800,000 people, the majority men and boys, died in only 100 days.
Today, the physical and emotional scars remain. Nearly 85% of Rwandans live outside of cities, and though the economy appears to be on the upswing, the country remains one of the world's poorest. Only main arteries are paved; the rest are dirt roads. And many residents in rural areas must walk miles to get fresh water from community wells.
Isaura Guzman knew poverty before showing up as one of the first Shooting Touch fellows in Rwanda in 2012. Her parents grew up poor in the Dominican Republic, and Guzman was raised in the projects in northern New Jersey. She played basketball for four years and was a team captain at Stevens Institute of Technology, where she said the "only people who spoke Spanish were the cleaning people and those working in the cafeteria."
Her background and what she read about the genocide informed her choice to go to Rwanda.
"I know how important basketball is for me and what it did for my life," said Guzman, who also has spent time working for the NBA's Basketball Without Borders program.
When Guzman and colleague Casey Stockton showed up in Rwanda, they started dribbling basketballs around the capital city of Kigali, just hoping to drum up interest and come up with a plan.
"We knew nothing when we got there," Stockton said, "so the method was, find a basketball court, see who shows up, talk to people."
EVENTUALLY, STOCKTON LANDED in an area called Rwinkwavu (pronounced rink-WAW-voo). About two hours due east of Kigali, not far from the Tanzania border, the sector consists of several different villages, with a population of about 23,000. There, next to a library, Shooting Touch acquired a plot of land and built its first court.
"I'll never forget that first night when the court was completed," Stockton said. "The lines were painted. We put up hoops. It was like a magical Field of Dreams for basketball."
Said Kittredge: "It was like, 'If you build it, they will come.'"
And they did come, though at first they were mostly boys.
"We had to beg girls to come out," said Stockton, who played basketball for four years at Denison University and is now a high school teacher in California.
When Diane Amizero first saw the court near her home in Rwinkwavu, she wanted to play, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. For a couple days, she walked by the court and only watched; a few were girls so bold they actually wore shorts to the court.
"The society we lived in at the time, although it is changing, when you wore shorts or pants as a girl, you were viewed as a prostitute and your family would not be happy about it as a result," Diane said in Kinyarwanda, Rwanda's national language.
When she finally decided to play, Diane hid shorts under her kitenge to keep her parents -- especially her dad -- from figuring out what she was doing. At the court, she would unwrap her kitenge, play for a bit, then wrap back up before going home. When, inevitably, her father found out what Diane was up to, he beat her with a belt.
She kept playing.
"I loved basketball so much, I was willing to take the hitting."
Still, for a time, Diane was among only a few women and girls willing to flout the norms.
Kittredge said another fellow, Lisanne Comeau, ultimately created the women's program and, with it, a health curriculum that was key to shifting attitudes.
"She was really the first fellow to bring the women into the program," Kittredge said. "And to really insist that they, too, play regardless of the fact that they were wearing kitenge from head to toe, or they were nursing babies or had other, obviously, patriarchal-governed chores to take care of."
SPORTS FOR WOMEN wasn't an easy sell -- and still isn't -- in these rural regions of the country that remain very much a patriarchy.
"There will be the husbands who will view women coming here as being useless and delinquent," said Amizero, now 25, a single mother of two and a Shooting Touch coach. "I know some of those. There are women that are forbidden to come here."
Nothing has been more critical to assuaging many of the men in the villages, including Amizero's father, than the decision to provide health insurance to the women and their families. At a cost of $4 annually per person, Shooting Touch began covering medical benefits, including vaccines, for participants and their families.
"To us, $4 is a cup of coffee; to them it's unaffordable," Kittredge said. The program receives funding from donations and has a range of sponsors, including the Boston Celtics, the NBA and ESPN.
"Our goal was to use the mobilizing power of the sport to get people to these spaces to be tested," Kittredge said. "Many of them had never been tested for these things before, and culturally, in their villages, getting tested for something like HIV or sexually transmitted infection or even the privacy of a breast cancer screening was not common."
The health curriculum also focuses on sex education and female empowerment, which has proved critical in communities where gender-based violence is prevalent.
"It has been our quest to use basketball as a safe space for these women on a daily basis," Kittredge said.
Today, Shooting Touch has expanded to seven courts in six different sectors throughout eastern Rwanda. It serves about 2,500 women and girls, and last year the program insured more than 10,000 Rwandans.
A dozen years after she first set foot on a Shooting Touch court, Amizero personifies the goals of the organization. As a coach, her job is to lead girls and women who were just like her back in 2012: shy and reserved, reticent to put themselves out there, fearful of what their husbands or fathers might do. Now, she knows she's a role model in Rwinkwavu.
"I am a good example to fellow girls," Amizero said, "because there must be girls or kids who would like to be like me, mostly because when a girl child gets here and sees a girl coaching, she definitely becomes confident that she's able to do that, too."
On March 16, Shooting Touch will hold its biggest event of the year to mark International Women's Day. More than 1,000 people are expected to participate in the day, which will include a 5K march, followed by a basketball tournament and health testing. There will be music and speakers who will focus on promoting gender equity and women's health.
"What Shooting Touch has changed is that the women of Rwinkwavu understand that they can do their chores but make time to bathe and exercise," Amizero said. "So I would say that it helped them to be more confident and restored their value that was taken from them by society ... as of now, they understand that they have worth."
Freelance reporter Ivan Mugisha, freelance interpreter Tresor Kambanda, ESPN associate producer Lyndsey Armacost and researcher John Mastroberardino contributed to this report.
