Monrovia to Moate: Boidu Sayeh’s extraordinary journey to play for Westmeath

One night, early on in his time with the Westmeath football panel, Boidu Sayeh pulled up a chair in a circle of his new teammates. It was a team meeting but not a team meeting at the same time. More a discussion group, a way of shedding shells about the place. The topic for the night was the challenges everyone had faced in their life and the floor was open to all.

The chat went around the room at the usual halting pace. A few stories about injuries, some lost grandparents here and there. Meanwhile, Sayeh sat waiting for his turn, not really knowing what to say.

“All the lads were on about their grandmother dying and all these things and I was like, ‘Shit, sorry, I don’t want to offend anybody…’”

If he had been so inclined, he could have kept them there all night. Could have plucked anything from the shelf and sung a lament. Like growing up in Liberia, the fourth-poorest country in the world, during a bloody civil war. Like losing his mother to malaria when he was six. Like being shipped 5,000 miles to Ireland at the age of eight to go and be adopted by an uncle he barely knew at the time. Like getting the news as a 16-year-old that his birth father had died back home in Monrovia.

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But he didn’t tell them all that. Bits of it, yeah, but that’s all. Just enough cloud to set up the silver lining.

“When it came to me,” he says, “I was thinking, ‘Well, I never had anything negative in my life because all the negative things turned positive’. Because this is what happened. I got to move from a poor, poor country to come to Ireland. I left one of the poorest countries in the world to come and live in Moate, a place I had never heard of. And it was great.

“I moved from a third-world country to a first-world country and my life feels a lot better that it would ever possibly be back in Liberia. And like, yeah, bad things happened. It was crazy. There was a civil war and I lost my parents and stuff like that. I don’t want to offend anybody, I know it sounds bad. But like, it’s all a positive in the end.”

Sitting beside Sayeh, John Heslin was next to go.

“Well,” said the team’s star player. “My story is going to sound like shit now.”

He was born Linus Dugbe Sayeh, after his father. When he was very young, they called him Boy-Dugbe and it got shortened to Boidu long before he had the years or the pull to object. A lifetime later, he made an attempt at a reinvention when he started college in Waterford IT, stating that his name was Linus Sayeh. It lasted until his cousin, who was also at the college, called him Boidu in front of everyone and everyone decided they liked it. So he's Boidu, like it or not.

Gun battles

“It means I have BS on my track-suit,” he laughs, fingering the letters on his Westmeath training top. “Bullshit, like! I hate that.”

Ah, he does and he doesn’t. Hate isn’t an emotion he has ready access to, in all truth. He came into the world in February 1996, in the teeth of the first Liberian Civil War. Around the turn of the century, there were few more dangerous places in the world to be born into than Monrovia. Constant militia on the streets, endless gun battles and mortar fire, the city ground to dust, street by street, building by building. For the first seven years of his life, it was all anyone knew.

“It’s only now I’m older that I really have a sense of what was going on at the time,” he says. “I’d be looking at my phone and reading the history of Liberia and looking at YouTube clips. And I’d be like, ‘Jesus Christ, like this is crazy.’ People getting shot, people moving because there are people getting shot and all that crap.

“I didn’t really know much of what was going on but you still knew. You don’t want to be in this spot for too long because people are shooting and killing and whatever else. It’s crazy that way – you don’t know what’s happening but you know something is happening and it’s not good.

“I was being moved around a lot with because I have a big family in Liberia, a lot of older brothers and sisters. They used to shift me from one sister to another brother to another sister. Me and my other sister – she’s two years older than me – we were both being moved around a lot. I don’t have much memory of staying in one place.”

In the developed world, we don’t really have a lexicon for the sort of childhood Sayeh experienced. You could call it deprived but that would imply that there was anything to deprive him of. By some estimates, the employment rate is 15 per cent in Liberia. International aid is the driver of the economy, such as it is. As successive governments were overthrown in the late 1990s, there was no infrastructure to speak of. First-world life just doesn’t really have a touchstone here.

“I have a memory of going to school but it wasn’t really school, you know? It wasn’t like school in Ireland where you go for the whole day every day and all that. I have a really strong memory of getting up in the morning, putting on a backpack and walking with my sister to school through a shanty town. You’d reach the end of the shanty town and there was this big building, a concrete building.

“I don’t remember actually being in class or anything, it was more a kind of a place you went for an hour or something and then you went home again. I think it was more to keep the children out of the way for an hour or two. It wasn’t really going to school properly.”

Eventually, his father decided it was no place for a kid to grow up. Boidu had an uncle Ben who had moved to Ireland eight years previously with his wife, Therese, an Irish nurse. In April 1996, Monrovia burned in fighting so fierce it made headlines around the world. Ben and Therese had escaped the city thanks to her Irish passport and they’d moved to Moate along with their young daughter Mairéad. Now Linus asked Ben if they would consider adopting Boidu as their son.

Eighth birthday

He said yes and that was that. The arrangements were made and Boidu’s life jack-knifed. He landed in Ireland on the day of his eighth birthday.

"But like, I didn't know what Ireland meant. I thought I was going to America. Seriously, that's what I thought. In Africa, when you're a young kid, there are two countries. There's Africa and there's America. That's all you know because that's all you see. That's what's out there, you know? Out there is America, in here is Africa. Like, even when you'd be watching soccer and you'd see Man United or Liverpool or Barcelona or whatever, you're still thinking, well, that's America. That sounds stupid, I know. But in fairness, I was only eight."

By Google Earth, Monrovia to Moate is exactly 5,000 miles. The mental shift is that distance, squared.

“My first time on a plane, my first time with new runners, first time with new clothes. Getting introduced to all these white people – who all looked exactly the same to me. Being introduced to all these new aunties and new uncles and new names. Imagine being a kid in that environment seeing all these new faces and not knowing where you are. It was mad.

“I had English but it was very broken African English. They didn’t understand me properly at the start. They would know what I was trying to say but they wouldn’t properly understand me. Every time I wanted to say something, I would have to say it to Ben and he would say it to them, kind of try to translate it. Therese, my mam here, she could understand me because she had lived out there.

“It was a completely different environment, stuck straight into it. Little kid, didn’t know anything, where I was, anything. But at the same time, because I was so young, I thought it was class. Moving over here, getting out of Africa was great. Every kid wants to get out of Africa because of what’s going on. You’re mad to get out. So I was like, ‘Oh my God, yes, I’m getting out of here’. Wherever I go will be great. I’ll get to play soccer, I’ll get to go to school.”

Everything was new, all the time. Midway through his first school year, he was sitting in the classroom one day when the teacher got distracted by him staring out the window. She asked him what he was looking at. He could only reply by asking her the same question. It was snowing. He didn’t know what that was.

“And she was like, ‘Oh, you’ve never seen snow before?’ I was like, ‘Snow? What is that? No, I never, never seen it before.’ So she got another teacher to teach the class and took me outside on my own to experience it for the first time.

“I was so totally fascinated by it. I put out my hand and let the snow hit it. You know the way snow melts in your hand? Yeah, I know that now but I didn’t know then. The snow hit my hand and disappeared. Can you imagine what that’s like if you’re nine years old and you’ve never even heard of it before? I was like, ‘Oh my God, like this is crazy.’

Midlands town

“That lunchtime, the whole class went out to play in the snow. It was heavy snow, it really stuck that day. So everybody went out and we built snowmen and whatever. But after a while, my hands just got so sore from playing in it. I didn’t know it would be so fricking cold! My hands just weren’t used to it. My hands went white-white and started stinging. I started crying at the pain of it and I didn’t know how to warm my hands up.”

Time passed and he grew into just another kid in just another midlands town. Accent and everything. He ran in the Community Games, played any amount of soccer. He’d grown up playing soccer in flip-flops so once he put on a pair of boots, he had more power in his shot than anyone else his age. When the time came in the school to play Gaelic football, he hadn’t much to him besides that ability to get distance into a kick. The GAA coaches he came across decided that was as good a start as any.

John Keane, the two-time All Star Westmeath defender, got hold of him at under-14 level. By then, he was strong, athletic and had a big boot on him but he wasn't a footballer. Keane taught him how to solo the ball, how to take a play before kicking it away, all the nuts and bolts that come naturally to any Irish kid. Four years later, Sayeh was a Westmeath minor, corner-back on the team that made it to the Leinster final.

“I got a bit better and then as I moved up through the ages I got a bit better there as well. It just went up and up and up. I’d be naturally sporty anyway so it was easy enough to pick it up. I didn’t actually find Gaelic that hard to pick up really, thinking back – I had great coaches.”

And so here he is, 22-years-old and ready for championship. Westmeath are out against Laois tonight and though they’ve been hit by injuries and some defections Stateside, he talks as if he couldn’t care less about any of that. The way he sees it, out of negatives come positives and it doesn’t do to get too down about anything.

Because sometime this summer, be it tonight or some other, a boy who was born and raised in such peril that his father had to send him halfway around the world to keep him safe -will take the pitch in the Leinster senior football championship. He will drive a shoulder or launch an attack, dish off a handpass or dive for a block. He will do all the little things that we think of as ours in this dog of a game that we spend half our lives complaining about.

And that will be a beautiful thing. A really beautiful thing.