Forced from home by war, they found solace in football

Mae Sot, Thailand: It was just a regular practice, but the players were excited to get on the football field. They divided into teams and chose from an array of bibs that all bore the same message: "Women Win."

Just being on the field was a revolutionary act for some of these girls and women -- migrants from Myanmar, or Burma, in Thailand -- because they were defying cultural norms by playing a sport. On that recent Monday evening, it was a place to forget for a little while the civil war that has ravaged their native land and the worries about life in their adopted home as refugees or migrants in the country without legal permission.

The coach blew a whistle, and the match began. Some of the women moved the ball deftly past others. Cheering their friends on from the sidelines, others screamed in Burmese, "The ball is here!"

There has long been a sizable Burmese community in the city of Mae Sot, a trade hub in western Thailand. But since the Myanmar military seized power in a coup in February 2021, that population has swelled and transformed Mae Sot, as people fled the military dictatorship's campaign of bombings and torture.

Nyein Pyae Sone Naing, 37, is one of them. She was an assistant manager for the soccer federation in Yangon, Myanmar's biggest city, but never played because her parents forbade her to do sports. After the junta took control, she was one of many peaceful protesters charged with incitement. She fled to the jungles, where for a while she was a medic for an armed rebel group. She moved to Mae Sot in 2022 and signed up for football this July.

Her first time was a disaster. Each time the ball flew in her direction, she dodged it. Asked to run for the ball, she shouted back, "No!" The outing left her so sore that she had to take painkillers.

Nyein Pyae Sone Naing said she was inspired by her 16-year-old son, who played with her that first time in a mixed game. "Now, he sees me as his hero and says I can do anything," she said. She returned the following week.

The Monday practices are run by a decade-old nonprofit called PlayOnside. One of its goals is to foster communication between migrant children from Myanmar and the local Thai population of Mae Sot.

At least 3,50,000 Burmese now live in Mae Sot, a third of whom arrived after the coup, according to the Joint Action Committee for Burmese Affairs. The Mae Sot government puts its total population at roughly 175,000, suggesting that many Burmese are here illegally.

A community that was largely migrant workers from Myanmar is now an assortment of activists, teachers, filmmakers and celebrities. In restaurants and cafes, one often hears more Burmese than Thai in this dusty border town that is quickly filling up with safe houses.

For the migrants, life here is a constant state of waiting. Waiting to hear back on asylum offers. Waiting to see if they can ever go back to a democratic Myanmar. There is anxiety and paranoia about being spied on by the junta.

PlayOnside tries to help with this too and offers group therapy of sorts. After practice that Monday, 50 girls and women, ranging in age from 13 to 45, sat in a circle. It was time for "women's talks," and the theme that day was, "Bad day, not bad life."

"Today, I had a job interview. Since I'm an ethnic minority, I was worried because I'm not very good at speaking Burmese. I don't speak English well either," a petite woman said in Burmese.

"Everyone living here is constantly dealing with stress and struggling to get by," a woman in a red jersey said. "That's why I came here with the determination to survive and make this place a place of solace for myself."

For those fleeing the war in Myanmar, living in Mae Sot can be both a haven and a hazard. Thailand has sheltered about 90,000 refugees from Myanmar across nine refugee camps since the mid-1980s but has also pushed back thousands of the recent arrivals, according to Human Rights Watch.

Ei Ei Aung said when she first moved to Mae Sot in 2022, she was lonely, jobless and lived in fear of the Thai police.

"When I play football, I forget about the stress," said Ei Ei Aung, 41, who represented Mandalay, Myanmar's second-biggest city, in the Under-14 division. "I also realized that I'm not the only one with trauma and stress when I see my friends here."

Initially, it was hard for PlayOnside to recruit women to play. Schools with migrant populations would send only male students.

"What about the girls?" Javier Almagro, the Spanish co-founder of PlayOnside, said he asked the principals.

Finally, in 2017, PlayOnside started with seven or eight female players.

They turned up in pants, worried about exposing their legs. Now, all of them wear shorts. The women's biggest obstacles were often their parents.

"When I was younger, they restricted me, and I even got beaten for playing," said Thone Darin Han, 23. "I used to be jealous of my brother. My parents never stopped him from playing because he's a boy."

Fah Sai, 24, was raised in a refugee camp where men's football tournaments were organised.

"When I was in high school, I was told I couldn't join because I'm a girl," she said. "They believed soccer was a sport for men, saying it was too tough for girls."

Fah Sai, an ethnic Karen whose parents are from Myanmar's Kayin state, plays for Girls On Fire, a team made up of women from refugee camps in Thailand. Unlike more recent arrivals from Myanmar, she has lived in Thailand since she was born in 2000 in a refugee camp in Tak province, where her family fled a long-running conflict between Karen rebel groups and Myanmar's military.

Many of her teammates are not allowed to leave their camps unless they get permission from Thai authorities.

Often, they also need clearance from male figures in their families.

"We can't just change women's minds -- we need to focus on men's perspectives as well," said Pyae Sone, the PlayOnside coach.

His group started offering free transportation for the women and set up soccer sessions for their children, who play at the same time as their mothers.

In November 2022, Daen Kajeechiwa, a founder of PlayOnside who now his own training program has, raised money to start a women's tournament. This summer five teams played in a league for the first time.

During the second week of the Borderland Women's League, a crowd of supporters banged on tin cans and cheered on the teams.

On that Saturday evening, Fah Sai's Girls on Fire was pitted against Amicizia, Daen's team.

As the matches ended after dark, a birthday cake appeared: It was Daen's birthday. There was dancing and cheering.

Then it was time to leave. The men were waiting to play.