In the lush verdure of Indonesia’s island of Java, a young girl wearing baggy sweatpants, a short-sleeved shirt, and a black polka-dotted scarf punts a white ball. Before she came here, 12-year-old Hanifa Karimi had never played soccer in her hometown of Quetta, Pakistan—the city her family had escaped to after generations of living in Afghanistan.

“I love soccer,” says Maliha Ali, another girl from Quetta, who is sitting in Cisarua’s verdant grass, watching her peers kick balls. “In Pakistan, I was a fan of soccer, but I wasn’t given the opportunity to play.” She fondly recalls watching World Cup matches and cheering on Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.

Hanifa Karimi stands in the soccer field in Cisarua. Image credit: Sabrina Toppa

Each week in the Indonesian hillside community of Cisarua, Karimi and Ali assemble on the field with a group of other refugees. Like them, most of the refugees are ethnic Hazaras, a Shia minority group making up nearly 20 percent of Afghanistan’s population. Marked by their distinctive features and adherence to Shia Islam, the Hazaras came under heavy persecution in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban in the 1990s. In the years since, violence against the community has not abated; last week, ISIS targeted a Hazara protest in Kabul against a proposed pipeline, killing more than 80 people and injuring over 230 members of the Hazara community.

Although Maliha has two brothers who also play soccer, she never expected to find herself out on the field twice a week. In fact, when Maliha first started playing, her understanding of the rules was dim. She would pick up the ball with her hands, not realizing this was an illegal move. “As we never played in Pakistan, it was difficult for us,” she explains. “[Some] in the Hazara community said girls should not play soccer — usually the girls are bound inside the four walls of the house. But when I came here, I saw the boys playing, so we talked to the coach and asked if we could also play.”

Maliha says that despite initial barriers, the opportunities are now equal between the two groups. “From the start, some parents were not ready to allow the girls to play with the boys, but with the passage of time, their minds changed, and now they don’t have [objections].”

A trio of refugees take a break in Cisarua, Indonesia. Image credit: Sabrina Toppa

Safety has long proved elusive for the Hazaras, but in Indonesia, the young refugees are haunted by another problem: tedium. Indonesia, home to approximately 14,000 refugees, is a transit country for refugees awaiting a long-term solution. Most arrive to Indonesia by boat, in the hope of resettling permanently in Europe, Australia, or the United States. However, today the bulk of interlopers are known as “stranded refugees,” moored in a country that does not recognize their legal status.

Almost half of Indonesia’s refugee population originates from Afghanistan, followed by Myanmar, Somalia, Iraq, Palestine, and Pakistan. Most are waiting for a legal pathway of refugee resettlement through the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), but the process is long, effectively requiring a minimum wait of two years in Indonesia. No one is legally permitted to work or attend school, as Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. The majority of refugees, locked in a seemingly interminable stasis, sit housebound or resigned. When I ask questions about what they’re experiencing now, most express anxiety about mental atrophy after the loss of critical, unrecoverable years away from their education or productive employment.

Until they receive notification from the UN Refugee Agency about the status of their resettlement application, however, the refugees have few options. In this interim period, only a sport like soccer offers some solace, providing a common ground for disparate cultures to meet, a space to release energy, and a world to carve out a new identity at the end of a long, arduous journey. Perhaps best of all, soccer acclimates refugees to a new environment while preparing them for what’s next.