Rafique Mohammed lists the rations doled out every two weeks by UN personnel.
“They would give us 1kg of rice, a bit of oil, dahl and some vegetables,” he said. “There were a lot of people and little food. It was not ever, ever enough.”
It was all Mohammed ate for the first 13 years of his life, having been born inside Kutupalong, the world’s largest and most densely populated refugee camp, and home of almost 1 million stateless Rohingya people who fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh.
However, for the camp kids, just as coveted as any of those food items were the plastic bags that they came in. They would grab them, then take them to their friends and start constructing a ball.
“We’d put them all in one big bag and squeeze it, tie it with rope and make a soccer ball,” Mohammed said. “We would play with that, without shoes, in the dirt.”
A real soccer ball was a rare sighting in Kutupalong, but Mohammed occasionally caught a glimpse of one courtesy of a Bangladeshi visitor.
He memorized its shape as a prototype, but given the materials on hand, the result was not great.
“As soon as you have 10 kicks, it’s ripped off one side,” he said. “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 did not see a professional soccer match of any description until shortly before he left the camp for Australia.
When a teenaged Mohammed made it to Brisbane with his mother and two brothers, he held a real soccer ball in his hands for the first time. It was a Kmart cheapie, but perfectly full and round, just like he had imagined.
“I was just crying, holding the soccer ball,” he said. “It was the best moment in my life. I cannot describe it.”
The initial challenge was adjusting his first touch to a ball that behaved very differently than a scrunched-up bundle of plastic bags, but the skill was soon mastered.
In general life, those first 18 months were difficult. Some cousins living in Australia offered help, but the English language skills of his immediate family were non-existent and they craved community.
In 2016, Mohammed established Rohingya United.
“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 said. “We just got everyone down to kick the ball around in the afternoon. That’s how it started.”
The team became so big that he was forced to create a second one, called QR The Brave.
Both sides play in the recently formed Q-League, a Queensland-based multicultural competition offering migrant and refugee communities a chance to play soccer without paying registration fees.
The league features teams representing not only Rohingya, but also Nepalese, Somali, Punjabi, Bosnian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Spanish, English, South Korean and Sri Lankan, along with Australians.
“Everyone’s loving their life now, better than we used to live. They have their own opportunities, their own goals,” Mohammed said. “But 1.6 million people are still hoping like I was to get somewhere. 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?”
At the end of June 2017, an estimated 35,480 people from Myanmar were living in Australia, the Refugee Council of Australia said.
There are more in offshore detention centers, such as Abdul Sattar.
Sattar was recently released after spending years on Nauru, in the Brisbane International Transit Centre and in a makeshift detention center at the Kangaroo Point Central Hotel and Apartments.
“He was a refugee running away to save his life, then he came to Australia and got locked up,” Mohammed said.
“My whole team fought and joined protests to get those refugees out of the detention centers and into the community to have a better life,” he added.
“When Abdul got released, he was so happy. We helped him to get a house, a driver’s license and transport,” Mohammed said.
Mohammed, who has a diploma in IT, works for Football Queensland and Multicultural Australia, but he keeps coming back to sports.
“That’s the best way to connect for me every time, with Aussies and other communities,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s football, netball — whatever you play. Even if you don’t know how to speak English, on the field you can because your body speaks the language.”
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