"The children were playing soccer with ammunition that minutes before could have killed them."

BarcelonaWhen looking for activities that break the ice between people, no matter how culturally distant they may be, Ric Fernández (Santander, 1982) chose soccer. "Soccer can be a way to let off steam, but it's also an art, and it's very inclusive. You don't even need a ball; you can play with a bottle of Fanta between two sweatshirts. Who gives you that? The dance? Do you need the music? The drink? You need the bar, the money, the drink, the connection," explains this journalist and aid worker in a video call between the Cantabrian region of Valles Pasiegos and Barcelona, which had to be done twice because the interviewer didn't record the audio correctly on the first attempt.

Fernández, who coordinates the organization No Name Kitchen, specializes in investigations into border violence that have been featured in media such as The Guardian either Al Jazeera, he took his goal to the ultimate conclusion: traveling halfway around the world, from Vietnam to his home, with the goal of playing football in every place he passed, even if it was the definition of dangerous in the dictionary. He has now published his experiences from this trip in the book Pachanga District (KO Books). One of the places where he had a party was in Bil'in, a small town in the West Bank located on the border between Palestine and Israel, where every Friday there is a demonstration against the construction of an eight-meter-high wall, the establishment of Jewish settlements, and the violation of fundamental rights.

The Friday in which Fernández participated in the demonstration, it ended, as is often the case, with Israeli soldiers firing rubber bullets (which have a steel core) and launching tear gas canisters. When the chaos evaporated, Fernández saw two Palestinian children playing soccer with one of the rubber balls and joined in. "The children were playing with the same ammunition that a few minutes earlier could have killed them. The feeling when I went to the West Bank [before the start of the Israeli genocide after October 9, 2023] was one of helplessness and, in a way, resignation on the part of the local population. To the point of playing with the ammunition that had just been fired at you," says Fernández. "It's something unusual that you don't find anywhere else. That it's so naturalized, that it's such a part of everyday life," he adds. The scene ended with a game between eight people.

The three prisons

Also in the West Bank, Fernández followed the adventure of Beit Sahour, a women's soccer team, to play in the Palestine Cup final against Ramallah United. On their 28-km bus journey to the Ramallah stadium, where the final was played, the obstacle was an Israeli army checkpoint. Naela and Nadeer, two of the Beit Sahour players, explained to Fernández that "playing in Palestine is like escaping from prison." When asked what these prisons are, they narrowed it down to three points: being a woman, being Muslim, and the Israeli occupation.

Earlier in Krakow, Kata, a soccer player playing on the Nowa Huta factory field, debunked Fernández's initial assumption that soccer is universal with a simple question: "How many times have you played a game with women during this trip?" Fernández had to admit that, until then, from Vietnam to Poland, he had played with zero local adult women. "I started with the idea that football is the most universal sport from a perspective that it can be played everywhere, but that's not the same as everyone being able to play it everywhere. The hypothesis was flawed from the start," Fernández admits.

A kidnapping and an arrest

"The starting point was to try to play in places where you wouldn't expect to play," he says when asked if he sometimes took his bravery too far, especially considering that one of the games, played in the Dahieh neighborhood of Beirut, ended with a kidnapping by Hezbollah. "It's hard for us to see from a Western perspective, but there are so many places with a naturalized presence of weapons and institutional violence that, if you take a route from Vietnam to Spain, you'll go through a series of situations that mean that, when you arrive in Lebanon and find a man who puts a gun to your head to make him tell him whether you're from the Mossad or not, it doesn't surprise you that much."

Two months after being kidnapped by Hezbollah, the loss of his passport while en route to the Shatila refugee camp led Fernández to be held against his will again, because they suspected he was a Syrian terrorist. In this case, he was detained by the Lebanese army. The delicate situation was resolved thanks to the coincidence that the general at the military base was the same one he had encountered after being released by Hezbollah and recognized him. "All the post-traumatic stress came out later. The things that had happened to me settled and came out later," says Fernández. But, during the hours he was detained, Fernández had time to play a game of soccer with the soldiers guarding him, using a bottle as a ball.