It is said that hope can come from the unlikeliest of places. For the Rohingyas, a veritable small army of refugees and exiles from Myanmar, such a thing felt like a distant dream.
Surrounded by atrocities and displacement, the Rohingyas have arguably seen some of the worst forms genocide.
Yet, a football team is proving to be a silver lining in the dark clouds surrounding their people.
The Q-League, an Australia-based, multicultural competition offers migrant and refugee communities a chance to play football without paying exorbitant registration fees.
The league features teams representing not only Rohingya people but also the Nepalese, Somalians, Punjabis, Bosnians, Vietnamese, Japanese, Spanish, English, Koreans, Sri Lankans and Australians, according to a report in The Guardian.
The Rohingya team, Rohingya United, was formed by Rafique Mohammed, who spent much of his early years in the Nayapara camp, where he lived off “one kilogram of rice, a bit of oil, dahl, and some vegetables" among several refugees for years. "It was not ever, ever enough," he said.
He and his friends took to playing with a makeshift football created by stuffing the plastic bags that the food came in into another bag, squeezing it and tying it with rope, improvising on using and repairing it as they went along.
“We would play with that, without shoes, in the dirt," he told the publication.
“As soon as you have 10 kicks, it’s ripped off one side. So you have to get the plastic again, tie it with rubber bands. But all we did was play. We woke up in the morning and go kick the ball around, go back again, play football again. It was all we looked forward to. We were doing nothing [else], just waiting for someone to take us out of the camp,” Mohammed said.
Mohammed had a deep love for the sport and would reportedly sneak into a nearby UN office to watch it on television.
Eventually, Mohammed made it to Brisbane, where he held his first real football. “I was just crying, holding the soccer ball,” he said. “It was the best moment in my life. I cannot describe it.”
Mohammed eventually joined the Brisbane community club Virginia United for two seasons, but he sought out community.
“We have a lot of youth, so me and my cousin created the club and thought maybe in the future we can get in the league,” he told the news agency. “We just got everyone down to kick the ball around in the afternoon. That’s how it started. We get a lot of community members coming to watch us, so it’s really important for us, because we represent that community and the name Rohingya wherever we go.”
Eventually, the team became so big he was forced to create a second, called QR The Brave.
“Everyone’s loving their life now, better than we used to live in. They have their own opportunities, their own goals. But another one at 1.6 million people are still hoping to get somewhere like I was. I’m still fighting to get them to be with me here. We have a lot of space here in Australia. Why can’t they come here as well?,” he said.
Mohammed, who has a diploma in IT, works for Football Queensland and Multicultural Australia, using his own experience to help asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants find a place to live and work and access services such as transport and healthcare, the report said.
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