“Win or lose…we are having fun,” Jonathan Fayiah says with a smile on his face. He’s getting ready for a soccer game in Vista with children like himself from all over the world.
The Liberian refugee says he started playing soccer in his home country at the age of five. The sport is his first love and he plays every day.
“Coming here is good cause this country’s good,” Fayiah says of America. “We have a lot of fun together like playing together, like going to school together and I love it here.”
Saturday’s game was set up by the Soccer Unity Project, a nonprofit that gets children involved in the community through the game. Players from the International Rescue Project faced off against YALLA, which works with refugee and immigrant youth.
“We want to teach these kids that it doesn’t really matter what you look like or where you come from, we want to welcome these people , welcome them home and treat them with mutual respect” Spencer Lalk who helped start the Soccer Unity Project tells NBC 7.
“I love soccer because you get to have fun,” the fourth grader from El Cajon says. “You get to meet new friends, new people from around the world and you get to have fun with them and be friends with them.”
Fayiah says when he grows up he wants to be a robotic engineer, but for now he’ll settle for being a soccer star.
