Soccer offers them a shot
Team is a haven for refugees from several nations — all held together by their coach
The 13- and 14-year-old boys had piled into the red van one by one, filling it with chatter and laughter after their soccer game.
Some pulled out their phones and ear buds as soon as they sat down, plugging into their music, video games and social media. The rest continued talking and teasing one another while the coach played pop stars like Bruno Mars in the background. The team van bumped along inner city streets from the South End, to West Hill, to Sheridan Hollow, to Park South to drop off the boys.
“Let’s give a round of applause for Alamin. He did a great job scoring goals today,” the coach, Amjad Abdalla, yelled for Alamin Alhassan.
Alamin, a 14-year-old who had come to Albany from Yemen with his family a year and a half ago, scored six of the seven goals against East Greenbush in their game that evening.
The boys repeatedly clapped as Abdalla, who goes by Ali, praised each of his players.
“What about Rooney?” asked Rooney Bahati, who came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2016.
“Clap for Rooney for being trash!” The coach’s affectionate teasing was met with a roar of laughter and applause.
“Clap for Mr. Ali for being trash coach!” Rooney shot back in a thick accent.
Freeze the frame in this moment, or any moment with this soccer team, and you will see smiles, laughter and joy. You would also feel warmth and an unshakeable bond.
Kids’ sports teams are a norm for many American families. Parents are often eager to get their kids involved in athletics to keep them busy and well-rounded, and maybe make them eligible for a coveted col-
lege scholarship. But the RISSE Soccer Team — affiliated with Refugee and Immigrant Support Services of Emmaus — is about much more than that.
The team provides a safe haven for the 18 refugee boys from Burma, Syria, Afghanistan and Malaysia, along with Yemen and the Congo. It creates a comfortable space where they can speak similarly broken English without feeling inferior, bonding over stories of their home countries and their experiences acclimating to a new country and culture. It’s a group that provides the parents — who work long shifts in blue-collar jobs — a sense of relief in knowing their kids are there, ensuring their safety and camaraderie with good friends.
The RISSE Soccer Team isn’t just a team, it’s a community — and for some families, a lifeline. No one in that community would think twice before saying it was created, has been nurtured by, and simply is “Mr. Ali.”
Abdalla, who is 26, knows firsthand what it’s like to be an immigrant and adolescent in America, and more specifically, Albany.
He was born in Sudan, and was still a baby when his family fled the country for the U.S. after his father was targeted for his opposition to the government. Abdalla returned to Sudan when he was 6 and came back to Albany — for good — at the age of 15 in 2007.
He went to Hackett Middle School, Sand Creek Middle School and Albany High School. He enrolled in Hudson Valley Community College for a year and a half before transferring to Iowa University. He still has a semester to go to get his degree, and works as the bus driver for RISSE, shuttling kids between their homes and the RISSE headquarters in the afternoons.
“Albany is a house of refugees, people coming from different cultures and backgrounds — sometimes that can be a good thing and a bad thing at once,” he said.
Abdalla’s parents didn’t let him have girlfriends in high school or go out to clubs, like the rest of his friends. He had to adjust and learn how to come of age with sometimes opposing cultural values at home and in his social life. So when he started the RISSE Soccer Team — which is supported through donations and sponsorships — three years ago, he made it his mission to help his players make it through the same experiences he had.
“I’m being a bridge for these kids, I’m engaging them,” he said. “I’m here to tell them what’s right and what’s wrong.”
More than that, he said, they are family. The days feel empty when he doesn’t see his players.
“We share feelings with each other,” he said. “We just complete each other.”
A member of the team’s extended family is Paw Shee Wah, player Klue Thaw’s older sister. She has joined forces with Abdalla to help her brother navigate growing up in America while staying connected to his family history.
Although she wasn’t yet 5 years old, Paw Shee Wah vividly remembers each time her mother gave birth to three of her younger siblings. She can still see the bright green flora of the jungle in Myanmar, the incessant rain that flooded the grounds, the large tree under which her mother lay in labor, not daring to let out even a moan lest the military find them.
“Every time when I talk about it it makes me so sad, I don’t know how my mom went through it,” said Paw Shee Wah, now 27, whose English fluency and cultural competency have made her a parental stand-in for her younger siblings and her family’s de facto spokeswoman. “My mom is a very strong woman,” she said as her eyes welled up with tears.
Her mother’s strength continued to shine through as she and her husband, children and three other families fled their village to a refugee camp in Thailand by foot, narrowly escaping the raids government military had been carrying out on various minorities, including their own Karen ethnic group. It shined through when she and her family came to Albany as refugees in 2011 in search of education and opportunity for her nine children, facing an uphill battle of adjustments to language, culture and lifestyle.
It shined through when she found herself a job as a housekeeper at Evergreen Commons Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in East Greenbush, despite her limited English skills, and got a driver’s license so she could commute to and from work.
Paw Shee Wah is a nursing assistant at Albany Medical Center and a Refugee Community Outreach Worker for Trinity Alliance’s Refugee Health Community Partnership Program. She reminds her younger brother, who was born in the refugee camp in Thailand, of their mother’s strength.
“I always talk to him about what difficulties his parents went through,” she said. “I don’t want him to just know about the refugee camp, I want him to know where his parents came from. Even though you are here, you don’t have to forget where you’re from.”
By recounting their family’s story to Klue Thaw, Paw Shee Wah’s goal is to teach her younger brother to be responsible and dependable for their family — which he now is, she says, because of the soccer team and Abdalla.
“He’s changed a lot thanks to Mr. Ali,” she said. “I don’t think anybody would do the same job he’s done for our families. Mr.
Ali will come with his van and take them to soccer practice and he will make sure that every kid will not stay home, not play video games or social media.”
Getting Klue Thaw to unplug from his phone is something Paw Shee Wah and Abdalla focus on together — and Abdalla, who pays Klue Thaw’s phone bill, is strict about it.
“I always yell at him for playing video games because that affects his eyes too. He’s always on his phone and playing Fortnite at school,” Abdalla said to Paw Shee Wah. “I actually cut off his bill for two months, I said, ‘I got you the phone for communication and fun, but if it’s affecting school I cut it off right away.’”
Abdalla does more than coach soccer — he’s the kids’ “parent, big brother, coach, friend, all in one,” as he says.
“I’m trying to drag them from their childhood to adulthood where they can understand what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s good for them,” he said.
From lecturing the boys to focus on their crushes’ personalities instead of looks, to scolding them to not be mean to each other, to telling them how to respond to bullies in school, Abdalla is the kids’ guide to coming of age in the U.S. And having grown up between Sudan and Albany, Abdalla can also lead them through adolescence while straddling multiple cultures.
“A lot of these boys didn’t know anything about American life. Their fathers don’t know anything about American life and how to deal with adolescence in America,” said Renee Bautista, a volunteer and close friend of the Karen refugee community, who describes Abdalla as a big teddy bear. “He went through being an immigrant, so he gets both sides: keeping your culture, your family, your faith and at the same time integrating. There’s nobody better as a big brother for these kids.”
The boys clearly adore Abdalla, who is always taking them to get pizza, watch movies, go hiking, and more — paying for all of it out of his own pocket. During soccer games, players waiting on the sidelines naturally gravitate toward him, circling around him and trying to steal his attention as he focuses on the game. They make fun of him for having a large forehead or ugly glasses, and Facetime and call him at all hours.
The adoration is mutual.
Each time one of his players is mentioned in conversation, Abdalla says, “He’s just my absolute favorite,” unable to single one out. He sees something special in each one of them.
When it comes to academics and behavior, Abdalla is strict with the boys, which has paid off — nine of his players are honor roll students, and one of them, Sa Kler Moo, just graduated top of his class from Hackett Middle School with a 97 percent average. The Karen teen spent his early years in a refugee camp in Thailand.
“I will do anything to make sure these kids get the best education, the best scholarships, everything,” Abdalla said. “They’re all like my little brothers.”
Not long after Abdalla dropped off Rooney and his older brother, Roger, at their apartment on Orange Street in Sheridan Hollow, his phone rang around 8 p.m. It was Roger.
“Mr. Ali, my mom wants to know when you can come look at the car,” he said. “It’s still not working.”
Abdalla told him he’d come by after dropping off the rest of the teammates. It was June 13, nearing the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan — only about 15 minutes until Abdalla could break his 16-hour fast. But he wouldn’t be able to eat for at least another hour, after finishing dropping off the boys and going back to one of his player’s homes to give him the phone he had forgotten in the van.
For now, Abdalla relayed instructions to Roger while driving, telling him to get in his mother’s car and turn the keys in the ignition part way to find out if the issue was electric. It wasn’t.
Roger soon found the gas cap open — someone had stolen gas from his mother’s car.
“I need to get you guys out of that neighborhood,” Abdalla said. “I’m going to find you a new apartment.”
Two weeks later, Abdalla found the boys and their mom a new apartment down the street from their mother’s work — in a much safer neighborhood, to his relief.
Sifa Kito Gubandja, Rooney and Roger’s mother, left the Congo for a refugee camp in Uganda in 2009 with her husband, five kids, sister and her two kids because of government unrest. Her husband’s work with the government made their family a frequent target of stalking and attacks by the rebel militants.
Gubandja, who was a nurse in her home country, is working as a housekeeper at Albany Medical Center now. She came to the U.S. with her five children and her then-deceased sister’s two children on Aug. 11, 2016. Her husband is still in Uganda.
“Life is not easy, but luckily I found Mr. Ali,” she said in French, standing on the sidewalk on New Scotland Avenue during her lunch break. “He helps me so much with these kids. He gives advice to my kids. When I have a problem at home, he’s the one I call. I consider him to be more than a coach to my kids, he’s like my brother.”
And if she were to ever leave Albany, she said, “my kids tell me, ‘Leave us with Mr. Ali.”
“I’m trying to drag them from their childhood to adulthood where they can understand what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s good for them,” he said. — Ali Abdalla, coach of the RISSE Soccer Team