A club with a mission: Kitchener’s refugee soccer team brings hope for persecuted Rohingya
CTV
Brothers Safi and Beza Ullah first fell in love in with the game of soccer while growing up at a refugee camp in Bangladesh.
Brothers Safi and Reza Ullah first fell in love in with the game of soccer while growing up at a refugee camp in Bangladesh.
“We were playing soccer with whatever we find. We’ll play with plastic bags or barefoot on a rice field paddy field where the cows walked,” said Safi, who is 28 years old.
“We played in dirt areas with a lot of rocks. I came back with injuries almost every other day, but I still loved it for sure,” said 25-year-old Reza.
From dirt fields to stadiums, the Ullah brothers are now members of the Rohingya Football Club in Kitchener.
They came to Canada in 2006 as one of the first Rohingya refugees to arrive in the country.
Rohingya people are persecuted as a muslim minority in their homeland of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Roughly 1 million Rohingya people have had to flee to refugee camps in neighbouring countries like Bangladesh and Malaysia.
