“I’m not f***ing going back home.” Serge Atakayi can still remember his coach swearing.At first he thought it was a joke. Even now he still finds it hard to believe.
Not going home? Serge was 10 years old.He was in Finland and 4500 miles away from his home, Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.But the guy looking after this group of African children was being deadly serious.
At that moment, in the changing room of a Helsinki school, those six words changed Atakayi’s life forever.Instead of making the return trip from a football tournament in Scandinavia, he sought asylum.When he and the rest of his team-mates didn’t arrive back in Congo, his parents assumed he was dead.Only later, while living at a refugee camp in Oravais, was he
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