CHANGING IMMIGRANT KIDS’ LIVES ONE SOCCER MATCH AT A TIME
On one side of the field, it’ll be kids, some who don’t yet know English; on the other, adult members of the Calgary Police Service.
When I ask Jean-Claude Munyezamu if that seems like an unfair matchup for a soccer game, he lets out a hearty laugh. “Oh, no, we’re going to let the kids win that one,” he explains. “Then we’ll mix the teams and the real competition begins.”
On Aug. 12, more than 100 Calgary kids will wind up their annual soccer camp with a “Cops vs. Kids” soccer day.
The first-ever tourney is the brainchild of Munyezamu, the man behind the local sports charity Soccer Without Boundaries (soccerwithoutboundaries.org).
“We want to show them that the police here are people you can trust,” says the father of three whose sports charity received its charitable status in early 2016.
“How do you teach that to kids? They have to experience it firsthand.”
It was an offer the police couldn’t pass up.
“It’s good for youth to see police doing ordinary things,” says Const. Rayn Boyko of the CPS’ community and youth services section. “It’s an opportunity to build relationships with our diverse community.”
For these kids, it’s not just a feel-good experience — it’s a lesson vital to their very survival.
Many of his young players’ previous experiences with law enforcement have been vastly different than that of their Canadian-born counterparts.
“Some have spent years living in refugee camps, where the people have no rights and the police’s job is to keep them in the camp,” he says.
Munyezamu, who formed his first kids’ soccer team in his southwest neighbourhood in 2009, agrees that recent incidents in the U.S. of police fatally shooting black men — along with last week’s death of a Somali-- Canadian man after a confrontation with Ottawa police — have made such a lesson even more urgent.
“They watch TV and see what’s going on,” he says.
“They think it’s happening right outside their door.”
Since coming to Canada from Rwanda in the late 1990s in his early 20s, Munyezamu says he’s seen much progress in how the Calgary Police Service approaches local immigrant communities.
“Under Rick Hanson,” he says of Calgary’s former police chief who expanded the organization’s multicultural outreach component, “there was a greater awareness and focus put on relationships.”
When I ask him if he, too, had preconceptions about the police when he arrived in Canada as a young man, he nods his head vigorously. “Every immigrant is afraid of police.”
Still, there is a high degree of fearlessness, not to mention optimism, in the story of how Munyezamu went from being a young newcomer who couldn’t speak a word of English to becoming the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee medal for community service.
Fleeing Rwanda not long before the genocide that took the lives of approximately one million of his fellow citizens, Munyezamu still lost several of his family members and, prior to those 100 horrible days in 1994, was the victim of harassment and discrimination for being designated a Tutsi, an illegitimate ethnic distinction.
Settling into a subsidized townhouse complex in Calgary made up of mostly immigrant families, Munyezamu noticed there was nothing for the kids to do. “The parents didn’t speak English, there was no family car,” he says. “That life makes a child vulnerable, with some turning to crime, to gangs.”
Within a couple of years, he had a full-fledged league with two locations, one in his Glenbrook neighbourhood and the other in the northeast. Earlier this year, Soccer Without Boundaries was awarded a Soul of the City grant from the Calgary Foundation and Calgary Economic Development.
Last year, the modest community builder enjoyed an even greater celebrity, after the publication of Will Ferguson’s bestselling book Road Trip Rwanda: A Journey Into the New Heart of Africa. “I had to turn down interviews because it was Will’s book, not mine,” says Munyezamu, a Calgary taxi driver who toured his Giller Prize-winning friend around the country of his birth. “We did get some donations to Soccer Without Boundaries, so that was good.”
Despite the challenges of limited resources, Munyezamu has big dreams for the kids in his community, which includes building an after-school facility with not only sports offerings, but also music and art.
His most immediate focus, though, is on Soccer Without Boundaries’ annual summer camp and that game with Calgary Police.
“It’ll be a lot of fun for everyone,” he says with a smile, adding, “and for our kids, an experience that is priceless.”
Some have spent years living in refugee camps, where (they) ... have no rights and the police’s job is to keep them in the camp.