![\"bosnia_homeless_team\"](\"https:\/\/pro.ba\/app\/uploads\/2013\/11\/bosnia_homeless_team.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBy Mladen Laki\u0107, Aleksandra Tolj<\/p>\n
For the members of one football team in the northern Bosnian town of Doboj, sport is far more than just a hobby. Most of the players come from the margins of Bosnian society and include former drug addicts, displaced persons, war refugees and asylum-seekers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Joining the Homeless Team has given them a chance to change their lives.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you say you\u2019re a former addict, people don\u2019t trust you and you can\u2019t find work, because people don\u2019t believe you\u2019re clean,\u201d said Dragan Maksimovic, a former drug addict from Banja Luka.<\/p>\n
Recovering from addiction was hard enough, he said, but fighting prejudice was much more difficult.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy choosing football, I hope I\u2019m sending a clear message to society about the kind of person I am now and what my priorities are,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The football programme is organised by the International Forum of Solidarity (IFS-EMMAUS), part of the international EMMAUS network set up to help homeless people. The group is the Bosnian partner of the Homeless World Cup association, headquartered in Scotland.<\/p>\n
The idea of setting up football teams made up of homeless people originated at a conference in South Africa in 2001, and the first Homeless World Cup took place two years later in Austria with 13 teams competing. The stated goal of the annual tournament is to \u201cuse the power of football to energise homeless people so that they can change their lives\u201d.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s Homeless World Cup, which will take place in Poznan, Poland in mid-August, will see teams from 64 countries taking part.<\/p>\n
In 2011, Bosnia set up its own team and came sixth in its first Homeless World Cup championship.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course success makes us happy, but our ultimate goal is to win not at football, but in our fight for a more humane society,\u201d the team\u2019s coach Elmedin Skrebo said. \u201cWe find players through our various projects dealing with these categories, and through contacts with other similar organisations,\u201d Skrebo said.<\/p>\n
New players are selected every year so that as many people as possible are able to take part in the project, he said, and IFS-EMMAUS provides accommodation for them at the training centre in Doboj. The players are not paid.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven the team that wins the cup doesn\u2019t get any money for that. The rules are very clear in that respect,\u201d Skrebo said.<\/p>\n
In April, Doboj hosted a tournament, with homeless teams from Croatia and Slovenia taking part as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough those two countries are considered more advanced than Bosnia and Herzegovina, we saw that former addicts, Roma and similar population groups there were treated the same way they are treated in Bosnia,\u201d Maksimovic said.<\/p>\n
Skrebo added, \u201cWe managed to attract a crowd of 600, which is a lot in a community as small as ours. Although we\u2019ve got a long way to go until we eliminate prejudice, and we\u2019re still at the beginning, it\u2019s good to see that people, especially the young, are interested.\u201d<\/p>\n
The coach proudly showed off photo albums and newspaper clippings about the team, noting that \u201cthe media has increasingly become interested and we\u2019ve managed to enlist their support in promoting our players\u201d.<\/p>\n
To qualify for the Homeless World Cup, players must be over 16, but there is no upper age limit.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s substitute player, 18-year-old Adnan Mekic, is the youngest member of the team.<\/p>\n
Mekic lives in the Mihatovici refugee camp near Tuzla. For 15 years, Mihatovici, the biggest refugee camp in Bosnia, has sheltered displaced people. Younger generations born when the war started have grown up in this settlement.<\/p>\n
In the EMMAUS caf\u00e9 in Doboj, Mekic \u2013 who has rarely been anywhere outside Tuzla \u2013 told IWPR that \u201cplaying football on this team is an opportunity for me to socialise, travel, and meet new people \u2013 one of the main reasons I am here. It\u2019s a great opportunity for me to come to Doboj and make new friends. That means a lot to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mekic said he did not find it hard to train twice a day, because he had always loved football and spends most of his spare time playing. Since he is a substitute, it is not guaranteed that he will be going to Poland. But coach Skrebo said that if Mekic missed this year\u2019s world cup, he might get to play in Chile next year.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if I don\u2019t get to go to Poland, these gatherings will stay with me as a beautiful memory,\u201d Mekic said.<\/p>\n
The coach joked about how he had noticed more and more girls adding his players as friends on Facebook. The players themselves said nothing, but smiled and checked their mobile phones.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what this is about,\u201d Skrebo said. \u201cOur society has to realise that even those who don\u2019t have money and live in tough circumstances are still ordinary people, just like everyone else who is better off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Skrebo said the hardest thing was securing funding for the project, particularly travel expenses for players participating in the world cup.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe hope that this year, just like last year, we\u2019ll get support from the mayor of Doboj South and the Federal Ministry for Sport and Culture,\u201d Skrebo said.<\/p>\n
Team members are grateful that the national football association has lent them equipment, and especially excited about the support they have had from Edin Dzeko, a member of the Bosnian national squad. A number of players from the national team appeared in a video about the project last year.<\/p>\n
Since the players live on next to nothing, one of the goals of the football project is to find work for at least some of them.<\/p>\n
One of last year\u2019s players, 26-year old Alen Basic, is among those now in employment.<\/p>\n
\u201cI now work in a dairy factory in Doboj. I didn\u2019t have a job before that \u2013 I was volunteering at IFS-EMMAUS and did not hold out any hope of finding work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Basic lives in a refugee camp in Doboj, consisting of two buildings funded by the Dutch government to house people who have still not managed to return to their pre-war homes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to be forgotten by everyone when society rejects you because of a mistake you\u2019ve made, illness or something else,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Basic said last year\u2019s Homeless World Cup in Mexico was a unique experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was such a great feeling for me. It was almost surreal. One day I was in Doboj and the next I was off to a faraway country,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He recalls how many people were at first suspicious and scornful of the Homeless Team, but their attitudes later softened.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything changed when the newspapers started writing about us,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen we returned from the cup, I realised people were taking us more seriously,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Basic still does volunteer work for the team, and acquaintances and neighbours have asked him how they could join the team.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey realised we were having fun, they saw our photos from the cup and they wanted to join \u2013 even those who initially found it all funny,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
This article was produced as part of <\/i>Tales of Transitio<\/i><\/b>n project funded by the Norwegian Embassy in Sarajevo. SCCA\/pro.ba is carrying out this project in co-operation with the IWPR and EFM Student Radio.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
International project helps homeless and underprivileged players to help themselves.
\nBy Mladen Laki\u0107, Aleksandra Tolj<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2357,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,59,57,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-other-projects","category-reports","category-tales-of-transition","category-tales-of-transition-2013"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n