A Way Home Together: Stories of the Human Journey

Ahmed’s family is resettled to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. After a year they move to Brookings, South Dakota so that Ahmed’s parents can re-evaluate their engineering degrees. After three years in Brookings, they move to Houston, Texas in search of new jobs.

What role can soccer play in bringing people together from different backgrounds and life experiences?

In this episode we hear from the teenage members of the Somali Stars-- a team of refugee kids in Utah, who are now part of the Cottonwood Football Club, playing other local teams. We also spoke to Mohammed, their 21-year-old founder and coach, tells us about his passionate commitment to the team.

Adam Miles founded the non-profit group Refugee Soccer, which provides financial support and assistance to the Somali Stars, is also a guest. Adam started Refugee Soccer after he raised money to send regulation soccer balls to poor communities in West Africa

"I started realizing instead of going eight thousand miles to Nigeria, I can go eight miles and have access to almost sixty thousand refugees in Salt Lake City, in the valley here," Adam told host Ahmed Badr.

We spoke with journalist, Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of "How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. He explains why refugees and migrants are essential to the future of soccer in America.

What does a 12 year old refugee have in common with the 83 year-old head of the International Organization for Migration, William Lacy Swing? Listen and find out.

Basel Al Rashdan was 6 when his family fled Syria. They spent three years living as refugees in Jordan. Today he lives on Prince Edward Island in Canada, a world a way from the home he left behind. Basel and Swing both had to redefine their idea of home. And both of them—for very different reasons—-have become public voices on the need for safer and more secure migration.

From the flood plain in Bangladesh to droughts of Central America and rural Africa, climate change is becoming a driver of migration. Farmers leave their land when the weather makes it too difficult to harvest crops.

In this episode of “A Way Home Together, Stories of the Human Journey”, we look at the impact of environmental degradation and change.

“It’s a very very complex topic,” says Dina Ionesco, Head of Environmental Migration and Climate Change Division at the UN migration agency, IOM. “Floods, desertification, sea level rise, and loss of ecosystems are drivers of migration, and increasingly so. But very often they are connected to other issues.”

Host, Tolu Olubunmi, has an in-depth interview in this podcast with entrepreneur and environmentalist, Ibrahim AlHusseini, founder and CEO of FullCycle, an investment company accelerating the deployment of climate-restoring technologies.

Ibrahim explains why he is “extremely hopeful” that new technology can create significant amounts of clean energy. This “isn’t just an exercise in doing the right thing. These technologies are also faster, cheaper and more profitable.”

This episode is produced with funding from IOM and FullCycle.

What happens when the world fails to live up to the goal of safe, orderly and regular migration? In the latest episode of "A Way Home Together, Stories of the Human Journey", we look at an urgent search-and-rescue operation to save the lives of desperate migrants and refugees, who were crowded onto rafts and small boats in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya.

"Lifeboat" is a half-hour film that was recently nominated for this year's best short-subject documentary Oscar. The Academy Awards will be announced in Hollywood on February 24.

"I consider it part of my work to make the unwatchable watchable," says "Lifeboat" Director Skye Fitzgerald. "If we can build empathy towards those who are making a conscious bid to flee torture, detention, rape and trafficking, I think it gets us one step closer to systematically solving the problem."

His film follows dramatic rescues by volunteer crew members on a re-fitted research vessel, "Sea Watch", as they save the lives of people in imminent danger of drowning.

"It's a shock to the system," said Sea Captain John Castle, who led the rescue attempts. "We've got a lot of people in terrible trouble in the small boats, and the boats aren't going to last very long out there."