Mohammed Annour spent much of his youth living in a flimsy shelter in a dusty, overcrowded refugee camp in east Africa, where the days were long, the food was poor and the future nonexistent. That’s one option,” said Annour, who fled war in Sudan for the refugee camp in Chad when he was 9. But you don’t have a future.” If he had stayed, Annour, now 33, has little doubt how his story would have ended.
Instead, he’s in Sweden, raising two boys, working as a quality control inspector for a textile company and playing amateur soccer for a team in the country’s fifth division. And the only thing that separates his experience from the tens of thousands of desperate people he left behind in the camp is the fact someone believed in him enough to give him a chance. People just need a chance in life.” “And we got that chance,” he continued, “because of Katie-Jay and Gabriel.” That would be Katie-Jay Scott and Gabriel Stauring, a pair of South Bay activists who showed up at Annour’s camp on a blazing hot day in 2011, rolled a battered soccer ball across a barren field and transformed an untold number of lives.
Scott and Stauring founded the humanitarian group iACT largely to respond to the crisis in Darfur, a semi-desert plateau in western Sudan that has known nothing but war this century. But unlike many of the dozens of other similarly minded people and groups working in Africa, Scott and Stauring came not to preach, but to listen. They came with questions, not answers.
And what they were told was that the children in the camps needed more than food and shelter. They needed a routine, they needed recreation, they needed joy and they needed hope. They just came around and took some pictures and then they leave,” said Annour, a slight man with a serious countenance.
They saw these people that can make something in life.” Stauring and Scott were killed in a car accident in Manhattan Beach five years ago, but their legacy lives on in the unique advocacy and aid program they created, one that uses soccer to teach skills and provide structure to refugees stranded in camps, shelters and intolerable poverty in four countries on two continents. It didn’t matter where you came from, which color you are. They were open and gave time to everyone they met.” “Honestly, I didn’t know they were going to change my life or anything,” added Moubarak Abdallah, another refugee introduced to soccer by Scott and Stauring.
But they were quite special people. They were listening to what I needed.” Today, there are more than 5,000 children participating in iACT soccer academies in Chad, the Central African Republic, Cameroon and Mexico. Another 1,800 children are enrolled in the group’s Little Ripples preschool program, which also served 475,000 meals to students and staff last year.
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