When the Portland Timbers face off against the Columbus Crew SC in Sunday’s MLS Cup, the teams will be led by an unlikely duo: former refugees.
Underlying Sunday’s championship game, to be held in Columbus, is the fight from dozens of governors and Republican lawmakers, including Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who want to close the door on Syrian refugees trying to come to the United States. “Right now, until we get a handle on where we are, we need to stop,” Kasich, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, said last month.
But were it not for a refugee from Sierra Leone, Kei Kamara, Columbus would almost certainly not be in the MLS Cup. During the team’s 2015 campaign, Kamara tied for the league lead with 22 goals and was named to the MLS All-Star team.
Kamara’s journey to Columbus began in Sierra Leone, where he was born in 1984. When he turned seven, the country fell into a bloody 11-year civil war that displaced more half the population and left over 70,000 people dead, according to United Nations estimates.
“I’m really blessed to be here, be in the U.S.,” the Crew forward recently said in an interview with Vice Sports.
“It was difficult growing up in Sierra Leone,” Kamara recounted. “As a kid you don’t really know what the war is. Then you start losing family members, friends, waking up in the morning and seeing bodies on the ground and vultures eating through people.”
He and his family applied to come to the United States through the Refugee Admissions Program. “Everybody goes in and if you get approved, you come out with a little bag. You get approved and coming out, you just start dancing,” he told MLSsoccer.com. To this day, Kamara says, when he feel nervous he just starts dancing.
He and his family were eventually accepted as refugees, which he calls “the happiest day of our lives.”
Kamara has also earned recognition off the pitch this season, winning the 2015 MLS Humanitarian of the Year award for his charity work with Schools for Salone, a nonprofit that helps build schools and train teachers in areas of Sierra Leone that were devastated during the nation’s civil war.
Going against Kamara on Sunday will be Timbers midfielder Darlington Nagbe, a native of Liberia. Nagbe’s family fled the civil war soon after he was born in 1990, settling in a refugee camp in Sierra Leone before moving throughout Europe.
In 2001, the family moved to Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, where Nagbe began to excel at soccer. He joined the Timbers in 2011 their inaugural MLS season and went on to win that year’s Goal of the Year award.
Nagbe became an American citizen just three months ago, and in November, received his first call-up to the national team where he helped the U.S. defeat St. Vincent and the Grenadines 6–1. During his five seasons on the Timbers, Nagbe has twice won the MLS Fair Play Award, given to the player who commits the fewest fouls and demonstrates the best sportsmanship.
The political circumstances surrounding refugees in the United States shifted after the November attacks by ISIS sympathizers in Paris, even though none of the attackers were Syrian or refugees. Kasich, who had previously supported allowing in Syrian refugees, is emblematic of that anti-refugee shift. Lawmakers in Columbus also approved a resolution calling for a stop to refugee resettlement.
The atmosphere in Oregon has been far more accepting. Gov. Kate Brown (D) declared that her state will continue to welcome Syrian refugees because, as she wrote on Twitter, “The words on the Statue of Liberty apply in Oregon just as they do in every other state.”
Meanwhile, the Timbers Army, a group of die-hard fans, has shown its support in another way: unfurling large signs at games declaring “Refugees Welcome”.
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