I was reading in the news a couple of days ago about the Eritrean soccer team. They went to play a tournament in Kenya but when the plane that was supposed to carry them landed back in Eritrea, the only people on board were the team coach and an official. The rest of the team vanished in thin air like in a magic trick…
Apparently this is the third time that an Eritrean soccer team “disappears” and it has to do with the political climate and economic problems in that country that make these players take a chance and seek asylum abroad.
This was also common among Ethiopians, specially during the hard years of the Derg ruling and also afterwards during the Ethiopian-Eritrea war.
I remember a less known episode that happened when a young Ethiopian soccer team was playing a youth world tournament in Argentina in 2001. After losing just three matches in the city of Salta and facing the return to Ethiopia, three players of the team vanished before boarding the plane back to their country.
Getachew Hassan Solomon, Abubakar Osman Ismail, and Seman Wajo Hussein apparently had been planning to do this for a while and ended up hiding with local families to avoid the flight home. Afterwards they also sought asylum with hopes of creating a better life in a new country. Unfortunately they arrived just when Argentina was in the middle of one of the worst economic crisis of its history.

The young men got no much help, just very little money from the UNHCR to survive for a few months. They tried to get jobs in local soccer teams without much success and after a while they also disappeared from the news and ended being just another anecdote. They merged with the local population and shared the same fate: no employment, poor living conditions and maybe the hope of emigrating to a better place (again).
What made those guys think that Argentina would be a good place to live? Why did they leave Ethiopia, their culture and their families? I wonder what has happened to them. Are they still living there? I hope they’ve found what they were looking for and were able to find a happy life.
They are just examples of the many Africans who risk their lives to run from their countries in search of a better future but suffer hard times away from their culture, their language, their families and then find themselves unable to return. And if they stay in their birth country, what are the chances of having a full life? Or simply of having a life at all… Many die young in wars, or for lack of food, or maybe from some preventable illness. It seems there are no chances for some, damned if they stay, damned if they go.

AliciA