I was commissioned by streetfootballworld, a Berlin-based NGO, to document their soccer programs in refugee camps in Europe; The Refugee Support Programme. Streetfootballworld had received funding from the UEFA Foundation for Children.
As part of the program, there are more than 20 different football-based community projects in refugee camps.
I visited camps in Germany, Ireland and Greece, photographing soccer training and matches played by
children and young people of many different nationalities.Many of the children in the camps are unaccompanied,
and it’s almost impossible to imagine what their life feels like. And yet, something so simple as playing football is as joyful to them as to any other child. Often, I would let them borrow the camera and take pictures or look at my photos.
Somehow it was like it made them felt seen, something which really resonates when you are free to leave a camp and come back home, hug your kids before you send them off to school for the day, and from that privileged vantage point realise that the camps and the lives of the people within them is nearly invisible to the rest of us.