How game’s enduring appeal is winning over Syrian refugees
Shatila camp’s displaced children embracing cricket Mixed junior team to play in London during World Cup
Cricket grows slowly outside the English-speaking world. The International Cricket Council expelled Cuba and its Spanish-speaking team for being under government control, while every Sri Lankan side has to be submitted for approval by its minister of sport. Yet Syrian refugees in the Shatila camp in Beirut are taking their first steps to assemble an Arabicspeaking team.
Almost two million people have fled from the Syrian civil war to Lebanon, although there are no official statistics, about a third of them children.
In 1949, Shatila was opened for 3,000 Palestinian refugees and now that Syrians have been shoehorned in alongside, the camp is estimated to house more than 10 times that number of people.
They have shelter, blankets, food and medical care provided by the United Nations, but nothing much to do: the Lebanese government allows the camp’s inhabitants to do only the most manual labour.
Hence, when cricket was offered in Shatila last October, 40 Syrian refugee boys and girls turned up for the first session, and 140 by the end of the week. The organisers are the local charity, Basmeh & Zeitooneh, which funds other projects in the camp, and the management consultant McKinsey & Company, which is providing support for some of the charity’s activities, in particular education programmes.
If cricket has made little headway
in the Arab world before, it has a unique selling point. As in Rwanda, which too has seen massacres, cricket can arrive in Lebanon without any baggage: it is not gender-specific, and it is not associated with the colonising power, which was France. It is just fun.
Especially, that is, when the coaching is done by Capital Kids Cricket, founded in 1989 to promote the sport in London schools that were seeing their playing fields being sold off, and it receives far less funding than betterknown cricket charities.
Yet it is CKC, under its indefatigably enthusiastic CEO Shahidul Alam or “Ratan”, that is putting together the biggest primary schools festival seen, during the World Cup in July, when 2,500 children are due to play more than 100 games at one time on the same day on Hackney Marshes and set a world record.
Ratan, who coached Bangladesh Under-19s before moving to London,
was never going to pass up a project in a refugee camp in Beirut. Shatila has one asset, too, apart from the willingness of its inhabitants: a football field with an artificial surface suitable for batting.
The current ambition is to stage a two-hour session every Friday afternoon in Shatila and create an under-13 and under-14 team of players of both genders – who, ideally, will compete in the mini-World Cup to be staged on Hackney Marshes.
A Bola Junior bowling machine will be flown out in March to expedite the development of Syrian batting and fielding.
The first recorded reference to cricket being played abroad was in Syria, by sailors and residents in Aleppo, which was then nearer the sea, in 1676.
A lot has flowed under the bridges of the region since then, but at last the sport is back, and ready to rebuild bridges in its unique way.