Soccer coach amoung Ukrainian refugees | Nenagh Guardian

Emmanuel Abiodun Ayobami fled war in Ukraine with wife and daughter and begins a new life in Nenagh

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Life was going smoothly for Emmanuel Abiodun Ayobami, a 34-year-old professional coach in Ukraine. Then the war started, prompting him to flee west to Poland with his wife and young daughter before ultimately ending up as a refugee in Nenagh.

“I had a good job as a coach of an amateur team,” Emmanuel reveals to The Guardian as we chat in the lobby of Abbey Court Hotel, which is his home for now along with approximately 40 other Ukrainian refugees uprooted from their homeland as a result of the brutal bombardment by Russia.

Emmanuel, a Nigerian national who first emigrated to Ukraine 14 years ago in the hope of becoming a professional footballer, used to coach in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, much of which has now been destroyed by Russian bombing, despite the fact that the region has close cultural ties to Russia, is a Russian speaking city and is only an hour’s drive from the border between the two countries.

“The club I worked with as a chief coach and sports director were wonderful to me,” Emmanuel recalls. “Any problem I had they solved it for me.”

But life for Emmanuel changed dramatically when Russia first invaded Ukraine on February 24.

“We finally got out of the country and into Poland five days later. Before I left I heard many explosions, particularly on the outskirts of Kharkiv,” says Emmanuel. “We were all running to basements for shelter. I definitely did – everybody did. The country just wasn’t safe any more.”

He arranged for his wife, Diana, a Ukrainian national who worked as a translator in Kiev, and their 9-year-old daughter, Jennifer, to flee west with him.

They left most of their belongings and and embarked like thousands more on the precarious journey west into Poland before moving on to Berlin for a short period, and finally Ireland.

Before, life had been normal for Emmanuel and his family. He had just treated himself to a holiday in his home country of Nigeria and had only returned a fortnight to Ukraine when the war and the Russian bombing and rocket attacks began.

Looking now at the ruins caused by Russia’s bombs and rockets in Kharkiv and Kiev, and the news of the daily atrocities that has resulted in massive loss of lives, he is sure the decision to leave everything behind in the two cities where they had previously lived peaceful lives was definitely a wise one.

And though he himself is not a native of Ukraine, he feels sad an upset over Vladimir Putin’s war on the country where he has made a good life for almost a decade and a half.

FOOTBALL DREAM

When he first arrived from Nigeria as a 20-year-old aspiring soccer star in the soccer-mad former Soviet country in 2008 he had hopes of making it big in the sport.

But he says that the style of play he learned as a juvenile player growing up in Nigeria was very different to the way they played the game in Ukraine and it militated his progress.

Yet he was talented and good enough to be selected to play professional with an Under 21 side for over two years at premier league level and never lost the passion for the game, so much so that he ultimately decided to go into coaching when his own playing career ended in 2018.

Yet, even though soccer was his life, he was acutely aware from an early age that he needed to educate himself and secure some kind of qualifications to enhance his employment prospects once he retired from the game.

He was not long in Ukraine when he went to university. Culturally, it was a big move coming to Ukraine from Africa and so he first had to sit a preparatory course to learn the language before progressing to study for a degree in marketing.

Emmanuel met his future wife while in college and she and their daughter landed in Dublin on March 29 and their stay as refugees in the Abbey Court Hotel is being funded by the State.

SUPPORT GROUP

Emmanuel, still looking strikingly athletic and well over six feet tall, says the Nenagh support group set up by volunteers to help refugees arriving in the town have been of great support to him and his family in providing help and assisting them on filling forms to access their entitlements while in Ireland.

“On one of the forms I wrote down that I was a football coach and interested in work as a coach because I have been involved in the sport all my life,” Emmanuel reveals.

“But I wouldn’t mind doing other work now because the situation has changed so much. If I can’t get a job in soccer I will have to do something else.”

He knows he’s not going to get a job as a professional coach in Nenagh, but says there may be better work opportunities for both himself and his wife in cities like Limerick, Dublin or Cork.

Emmanuel says he has experienced nothing but kindness since he arrived in Nenagh. “Not only Nenagh – let me say Ireland. It has been a great experience. The people have been wonderful and very accommodating and they love to chat.”

He says one of the founders of the Nenagh support group, Sandra Farrell, has put him in touch with an official of Nenagh AFC, a club that has opened its doors wide to young players arriving from Ukraine by offering them free membership, free entry to the club’s Easter soccer camp and offers of free gear, sponsored by local businesses.

Emmanuel has already got stuck in to a few training sessions with the club’s adult players to keep himself fit as he and his family try to cope with finding their bearings in their new and strange environment, thousands of miles away from their home.

He has thought about returning to Ukraine one day, but says war and destruction has fundamentally thrown the country into what looks like being long-term chaos and he wonders if the country can ever again offer even a semblance of the life he and his family once enjoyed

“This is not just a riot. The country we left has been vastly changed by war,” says Emmanuel.

He says he feels fortunate to have ended up in Ireland. Fluent in English and a native of an African country were over 12 per cent of the population speak the language, he says he is more at home in Ireland than in north eastern Ukraine where most people speak Russian.

He is glad too that his young daughter has ended up attending primary school in Nenagh as he feels confident she will now become fluent in English, opening her up to new opportunities she would not have had back in Ukraine.

Desite the ravages that resulted in him ending up in Nenagh, he feels he and his family are now in a better place and facing the prospect of better opportunities.

“In Ukraine it was easy to identify the rich from the poor. Here in Ireland you do not see that as clearly and I think people have more opportunities here,” he says.