Playing After a Big Loss

Mohammed Lappid remembers the day he started playing soccer again, straining every muscle to kick the ball, and missing. Then missing again.

Playing was something he needed to do. It took a month’s practice before he managed to make contact.

The game had been in the 22-year-old’s blood since his school days. That was before he lost a leg, like thousands of others, in Sierra Leone’s cruel civil war.

Soccer on one leg is a whole different ballgame. Your body is a traitor and balance an elusive friend. Catch a crutch on a small rock or stumble, and you’re down like a felled tree.

“Some people said, ‘Go and find a better thing to do. One leg, you can’t play football anymore,’ ” said Lappid, remembering that day five years ago when he and a few other amputees first got together to play on a stony stretch of dust here. “Many of us said, ‘Let’s give it up.’ Some left.”

But once they taught themselves to play, they found the old rush was still there: hurtling to the goal, crutches flying, connecting boot with ball and sending it sweetly home.

“We started the team, only a few of us. Only some of us had the courage to try to kick the ball,” said Lappid, who, like the other team members, plays on crutches without a prosthesis.

“It was very hard,” he added. “I was feeling very discouraged, and I was ashamed of that. At that time, many of us were angry. Some were grumbling because it was not easy to play the ball.”

The country’s 10-year civil war left thousands of people disabled. Militias hacked off civilians’ feet or hands, melted plastic into their eyes or mutilated them in other ways. Many others lost limbs after bullet and land mine injuries.

After the war ended in 2001, Lappid and others sat around in a Freetown amputees’ camp mourning their many losses, bereft of hope or ambition.

“I felt isolated,” said Jabati Mambu, 22. “I felt angry because I didn’t want to be there.”

Then one day a Seattle woman named Dee Malchow, a nurse and herself an amputee, visited the camp.

“I didn’t know what to say to them. They looked so hopeless and overwhelmed and beat down,” said Malchow, a member of the Prosthetics Outreach Foundation in Seattle.

“The nurse in me wanted to fix them.”

One of the boys approached her and she dropped a suggestion like a small seed tossed onto the red Sierra Leonean dust: Amputees overseas played soccer, so why not here?

Today, the Single Leg Amputee Sports Club has three teams with a total of about 80 members, and the aim is to set up a national league. There also are plans to get female amputees involved in the sport.

“When we started training, people were laughing at us,” Mambu said. “We were falling down, getting injured. Some were just saying, ‘How can a one-legged man play soccer? It’s impossible.’ We said, ‘It’s possible.’ ”

*

When the boys from Manchester United, Arsenal or Liverpool run onto the field in Europe, the crowds go wild in Freetown. Whenever there’s a game, cinemas and ad hoc screening rooms are packed with fans watching their teams play live.

If the children kicking rubber balls around the dusty alleys of Freetown share one dream of escape, it’s to be up there playing soccer on those screens one day.

As a member of the school soccer team, Mambu used to skim along on the wing at the edge of the field, trying to score goals. He was sure he would rise and play for his country.

In 1999, when Mambu was 16, Revolutionary United Front rebels opposing the government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah attacked Freetown, the capital. People ran into any nearby house to escape. Dozens of strangers were in Mambu’s house as the rebels approached.

When the militiamen burst in, Mambu dived under a bed and others hid elsewhere. The fighters got him first and took several others as well. Outside, the rebels ordered a boy to fetch an ax. They grabbed Mambu and hacked at his left arm.

“When they saw I was putting up resistance they cut off my right hand” in punishment, he said. “Everyone scattered, and I was there bleeding and unconscious until the next morning.”

That they severed the right hand is “worse for me to this day. I find it very difficult to even write,” said Mambu, now a student and the goalie for the amputee team. (In amputee soccer, all players are one-legged, except for the goalie, who must be an arm amputee.)

For Mambu, playing goalie will never offer the same thrill as playing his old position on the wing.

“I’m forced to be the goalie,” he said sadly. “I’ve been a full active player on the pitch [playing field]. I would have been happy to have played for my country’s national team. I don’t enjoy being a goalie.”

Obai Sesai, 22, plays defense on his amputee team. He hid during the 1999 attack on Freetown but heard rebels capture his mother, beat her and start raping her.

“I walked out of the bush to go rescue my mother,” he said. In the struggle she escaped, but he was shot in the leg. He ran and hid in the bush for two days with a swelling leg before he managed to get to the hospital, where his foot was amputated.

Rebels attacked the hospital, but Sesai escaped, walking many hours on a wooden crutch to safety. It was a year before he found his mother.

Lappid lost his leg when he stepped on a land mine. He was taken to a hospital but received no treatment for a month because all the doctors had run away.

“My mum went and met a doctor and said, ‘Oh doctor, my son is dying, go and help him,’ ” Lappid said. “My mum got down on her knees and begged.”

He had several operations and spent more than a year in the hospital.

“I was praying to be dead,” Lappid said. “When I was feeling pain, I was crying out. I was praying, ‘Let God take my life because my suffering is so much!’ I know that God wanted me to be somebody in future. That’s why he didn’t answer my prayer.”

*

In the hustle of Freetown’s narrow streets, people hawk shoes, belts and bananas, pirated music, plastic tote bags, newspapers and coconuts, anything that will sell. Amputee beggars, including some team members, dodged cars.

This is a poor country where unemployment is high and everyone suffered in the war. Albert Sandy, principal at Freetown’s Milton Margai School for the Blind, said disabilities, even those resulting from war, were often seen in Sierra Leone as a curse from God or one’s ancestors to punish wrongdoing. Employers generally don’t hire, or even interview, disabled people.

The school board has been pushing for legislation to give the disabled equal opportunities and rights.

“Attitudes are not changing,” Sandy said. “Even at the very top, it’s difficult for them to accept a disabled person.”

But when the Single Leg Amputee Sports Club competes, people are dazzled by the speed and energy of the game and by the skill of the players -- the rules forbid using crutches to touch the ball. The players’ faces seem to show double the pain and effort of the able-bodied players who have used the soccer field a few minutes earlier.

One amputee player tumbles so hard he ends up on his head, then crashes down into the dust, face clenched in agony. Another falls and loses his wooden crutch but struggles up with angry determination, hops after the ball and somehow, as graceful as a ballet master, kicks it without the crutch.

“I’m overwhelmed watching it,” said Malchow, who considers herself the team’s mother. “It almost brings tears to your eyes watching them.”

Lappid used to be a right-footer before losing that foot.

“But when I get the ball and play it, it’s the same,” he said. “I cross it to my colleague. He passes and reaches the goal. If I or my friend gets a goal, I feel very happy. We hold onto our friends to celebrate.”

Malchow, who has worked with amputees for 30 years in Seattle and helped found the amputee soccer league there, says it costs an amputee far more effort to do what an able-bodied person can on the field, but the satisfaction can be greater, too.

“The happiness I get when I get the ball is more than I used to get when I played on two legs,” Sesai said. “I feel joyful. It’s a way of showing people.”

He added that being on the team “lessens the pain. I feel I’m among others who have the same pain.”

In 2003, the Sierra Leonean players traveled to Britain and competed against tough, experienced amputee teams, some with members who had played professionally before losing their legs. Last August the players, sponsored by donors in the Netherlands, competed in the World Championship of Soccer for Amputees in Brazil.

With their inexperience and limited funding, it wasn’t surprising that they lost most of their games in Britain and Brazil. But each trip was in its way a miracle, an improbable chance for young men who had been struggling on the harsh fringes of Sierra Leonean society to step into another world.

Just traveling overseas was enough to make them famous in Freetown. Now they are pointed out not because of their disabilities but because they are members of the team.

“Before the football team, I had nowhere to go. I just sat and thought about my problem,” Lappid said. “I was thinking, ‘I have one leg. What importance am I in the community?’

“As soon as I had the football team, I did not sit around anymore. It’s made my life change. Now I have courage. I’m not thinking about my problem anymore. And now I am a very strong person in the community. Anywhere I go, friends love me.”

The World Amputee Football Federation has endorsed Sierra Leone as host of the first African amputee soccer tournament in October. But uncomplicated happy endings are hard to come by in this part of the world: Playing host to the competition would cost about $300,000. The club is broke and expects no financial help from the Sierra Leonean government for the tournament.

In fact, the club is so poor that the players were forced to stop training and playing two months ago because there was no money to transport them to the soccer field each week.

As team members wait to see what will happen and when they will play again, they battle their ongoing pain.

Lappid lives in a tiny palm-frond shack. With open sewers and rotting vegetables strewn about, it’s hard for even an able-bodied person to weave through narrow paths after dark to reach his curtained doorway. Inside, Lappid’s voice is soft in the dim candlelight.

“We have the pain until God takes our lives,” he said. “It’s not finished yet.”

Two years ago, Lappid enrolled in law school, and he now looks to the future. As though unfolding a map to a secret treasure, he confides his plans to marry his sweetheart, finish his studies and become a lawyer like his grandfather.

“I hope people will realize we can do a lot of things,” he said. “Not just play football.”