CNN
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On a busy weekend in Freetown, Sierra Leone, dozens of folks collect to observe a day football match not not like numerous others you’d discover anyplace else on the planet. But there’s one putting distinction – these gamers are all amputees.
They’re members of the Single Leg Amputee Sports Association (SLASA), a company co-founded by pastor Mambud Samai in 2001 after he returned residence towards the top of Sierra Leone’s lethal civil war, which lasted from 1991 to 2002 and killed at least 50,000 people throughout the nation. Thousands extra had been left with lacking limbs throughout a brutal campaign to terrify the civilian inhabitants.
After coming throughout a refugee camp crammed with lots of of amputees, Samai felt compelled to assist. “At that time, there were no activities like trauma recovery for them. So, amputees believed that once they lost their limbs and their legs, they have no future, they have no opportunity. So, I volunteered myself to give them confidence,” he stated.
While on the refugee camp, he met an American missionary who launched him to a kind of adaptive football. After displaying the amputees how one can play, the response was overwhelming and SLASA was shaped, “to give hope to the amputees, to give confidence to the amputees, and to allow them to become ambassadors of peace,” Samai stated.
According to the World Amputee Football Federation, gamers can not use prosthetics and as an alternative energy throughout the sector on crutches. Each group has seven players on the sector at a time, with outfield gamers solely having one leg and goalkeepers solely having one arm.
Several SLASA gamers have since gone on to compete in international programs together with the World Amputee Football Championships, Amputee Africa Cup of Nations, and the Open European Amputee Football Championship.
“Most of them are now very proud that they can represent their country at international competitions,” Samai stated. “They are contributing something back to society.”
Samai says the game is just not solely an excellent kind of train, nevertheless it unites gamers and serves as a “therapy” for war victims to face their shared trauma. “We try to give them hope and then give them the credibility that they are useful, they are important to society,” he stated.
Ali Badara Kamara is a goalkeeper within the SLASA league. He says he’s grateful for the life-changing alternatives he’s acquired. “My mother was afraid (for) me to play football because she sees me as an amputee. She thought that if I fell on the floor, I would have another problem,” he says. “But SLASA (has) taken me to Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania.”
Kamara is one of the more than 80 million people with disabilities dwelling throughout the continent. According to the United Nations, that determine consists of these with psychological well being situations, beginning defects and different bodily impairments. With assistive gadgets typically unavailable or unaffordable, many discover employment laborious to return by and are left begging on the streets.
While football matches solely final 90 minutes, Samai’s newest mission is to discover a manner to assist amputees past the pitch.
“My passion (is) to make sure that every life, irrespective of your disability or irrespective of your background, that you are able to be happy and you are able to smile at the end of the day,” Samai stated.
To obtain that, SLASA works intently with the National Rehabilitation Center in Sierra Leone and companions with worldwide organizations like SwissLimbs to supply prosthetics for amputees and prepare native technicians.
In 2018, Samai traveled to Japan to review sustainable agriculture management and group improvement. Upon his return, he started providing lessons on sustainable agriculture by SLASA.
SLASA additionally assesses members’ schooling and gives studying assets to these in want. Its aim is to get extra amputees off the streets and supply them with a protected technique to make a dwelling for themselves and their households.
To date, Samai says SLASA has instantly assisted 350 amputees, and hopes to develop that quantity. The final aim is to construct a regulation pitch and rehabilitation heart of its personal.
“We want Sierra Leone to compete with another countries in terms of development,” Samai stated. “We believe that disabled people should not be left behind.”
Watch the full episode of African Voices featuring Mambud Samai here.