Summary
Introduction
On a spring afternoon in Georgia, USA, two teams are warming up for a soccer match. When a squadron of fighter jets passes over the field, one team of young boys looks up excitedly while players on the other team, including boys from Sudan, Liberia, and elsewhere, are much more negatively affected by the sight. These players are on a team called the Fugees, an all-refugee soccer team.
Luma Mufleh, the coach of the Fugees, tries to get her team to focus after the incident with the fighter jets. However, the boys continue to miss simple shots during warm-ups. As time grows close for the game to begin, a large crowd shows up to support the team playing against the Fugees, while the Fugees' sideline is empty. The referee mispronounces many of the Fugees players' names when calling them to declare their jersey numbers before the game.
During the game, the coach of the other team yells and yells, while Luma paces along the sideline silently. She has a personal code to teach soccer during practice and simply let the team play during the games. Even when players make good moves, she does not call out or even change her expression. The Fugees are in the lead 3-1 at halftime, but Coach Luma is still not satisfied. She tells them that they should be making more of their shots and that she wants them to cause the other coach to sit down and be quiet. The Fugees do not protest; they go back onto the field and make six more goals to win the game 9-2. After the game, the referee comes up to the team and commends them for their sportsmanship and talent as a team, telling them, "That was one of the most beautiful games of soccer I've ever seen" (11).
The narrator explains that this match was the first time he had seen the Fugees play since coming as a reporter to learn about the unique team. The reporter comes away eager to learn more about the team made up of young refugees from over 10 different countries and their stern, female coach, all hailing from an increasingly diverse town in Georgia. The narrator explains the fragility of the Fugees; they have no field of their own to practice, the players are all grappling with the new customs of America, and the coach has never been trained to deal with issues like PTSD and poverty.
The narrator ends the introduction by focusing on how the team treats a player named Zubaid. He seemed to have vision problems and missed the ball repeatedly. However, Luma tells the reporter that Zubaid is always at practices and tutoring sessions, so he deserves to be in the game. Not only does she support him being in the game, but his more skilled teammates let him have chances with the ball and make up for his weaknesses by following behind him. The narrator notes that when Zubaid made a successful pass at one point during the game, the team celebrated him excitedly.
Chapter 1: Luma
Luma Mufleh, the coach of the Fugees, grew up in a wealthy family in Amman, Jordan. Because of her family's wealth, she was able to attend an international school where she learned to speak perfect, unaccented English. She was also coached in volleyball by a very strict American coach. Attending this school and living the way her family did, Luma was shielded from much of the strife in Jordan. However, she learned from her grandmother to always care for the poor. She also felt limited in her own life by the cultural expectations to stay in Jordan, get married, and honor her family in certain ways.
Luma did not like her volleyball coach, Rhonda Brown, but she wanted to impress her. Coach Brown made the team run and drill for a long time at every practice, and while other players on the team were lazy, Luma ran and drilled as hard as she could and became a better player.
In her junior year of high school, Luma and her parents decided that she would apply to attend university in the United States. The prestige of a Western education appealed to Luma's parents, while the freedoms for women in the United States appealed to Luma. Luma spent a year at Hobart and William Smith College, but did not have a very good year due to a knee injury and the cold winter. She transferred to Smith College, an all-women's school, for her sophomore year. During her junior year at Smith, Luma visited her home in Jordan. She realized that she had become so Western that she felt uncomfortable in her home country, and she resolved without telling anyone that she would not return there after graduation.
In 1997, when Luma told her family that she was not returning to Jordan, her father cut her off entirely. The family would not give Luma any more money or keep in contact with her at all. Luma, who had been wealthy all her life, suddenly had to look for the kinds of jobs available to illegal immigrants. She moved into the home of a friend named Misty in North Carolina and took a job washing dishes and cleaning at a restaurant. Feeling restless, Luma moved to Boston, back to North Carolina, and finally to Georgia. Her friends warned her that a Muslim wouldn't fit in in the South, but Luma paid them no heed and moved to Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta.
Chapter 2: Beatrice and Her Boys
In 1997, Beatrice Ziaty was living in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. She lived with her husband and four sons. Liberia was in the middle of a civil war, and rebel soldiers roamed the city streets with guns. One night, a group of soldiers came to Beatrice's house and forced them out of their home.
The narrator goes back to the 1800's to tell a more complete history of the conflict in Liberia. In 1821, Liberia was founded as a colony for freed American slaves. These people lived first under white rule, and after 1847 they ruled themselves with American backing. In 1980, American ties with Liberia were severed when an army sergeant named Samuel Doe killed Liberian president William Tolbert. Doe was a member of the Krahn tribe, a small minority group in Liberia. Another man named Charles Taylor began another rebel group to fight against the Krahn. This group of 150 soldiers attacked Monrovia and cut off all access to food, water, and medicine. Some Krahn fought back, while others fled to the Ivory Coast; over 150,000 Liberians died.
The Ziaty family was Krahn. Beatrice Ziaty would later tell the narrator how scared and hopeless the situation felt. When the men came to their home at night, they beat her husband. In a panic, Beatrice grabbed her two oldest sons, Jeremiah and Mandela, and ran away from the house. They all heard her husband being beaten to death back in the house. Beatrice and her two sons fled to the Ivory Coast, walking the whole way. They made their way to a refugee camp, constructed a mud hut, and lived there for five years. After five years, Beatrice received word that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had accepted their application for resettlement, and that they would be moving to Georgia. They would have to fly from Abidjan to New York, from there to Atlanta, and then be driven to Clarkston. The family was driven by a caseworker for the International Rescue Committee. When they arrived at their new apartment, there was food, sofas, and mattresses waiting for them.
Beatrice immediately started looking for a job and found one cleaning rooms at a hotel. However, the job was in Atlanta and required long hours, meaning she would have to be out of the house and away from her children from early in the morning until late at night. On her first day of work, she found her way to the hotel by bus, worked her long, hard shift, and headed home again by bus after it was already dark. When she got off the bus in Clarkston, she had her purse stolen from her by an African man; the purse contained all of her cash and important documents. She ran away and eventually a man helped her to call the police, who drove her home. After this event, Beatrice feared constantly for her and her children's safety. Since she heard from other Liberians in the US that your children would be taken away if the police found out you left them alone, she told her children to come home immediately after school every day and lock the door.
Chapter 3: "Small Town... Big Heart"
Before Clarkston, Georgia became a hot spot for refugees, it was simply a tiny, Southern town with mostly white, Christian inhabitants. In the 1970's, the airport in Atlanta became a major hub and the suburbs around the city began to grow due to those coming to the city for work needing cheap housing options. It was mostly middle-class whites who moved into the new apartment complexes put up in Clarkston; when crime started to grow in the area, the wealthier white people moved away, resulting in the apartments falling into disrepair. In the 1980's, a few non-profits dealing with refugees noticed that Clarkston would be an ideal spot to relocate refugees because of its proximity to a major city, its high-quality transportation system, and the surplus of cheap housing newly available.
Refugees began to arrive in Clarkston in the 1980's and 1990's; these refugees were mostly from Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Cambodia and did not cause much of a stir living in the cheap apartments away from most of the middle-class, white inhabitants of the town. The organizations helping to place refugees saw this as a positive sign and began to increase the amount of refugees and widen the countries of origin in the late 1990's, resulting in more than 19,000 refugees settling in Clarkston between 1996 and 2001. As would be expected, Clarkston completely transformed due to this influx of foreign-born people; new restaurants and a mosque opened, and many different forms of dress could be seen on the street.
The older residents of Clarkston did not protest the increase in refugees, but they noticed, and many felt negatively about the changes happening to their quiet, Southern town. The Clarkston police chief had frequent run-ins with refugees, many of whom couldn't drive well or understand English when spoken to. The police department began to make steady money off of traffic tickets from the newcomers. Many refugees felt discriminated against, but most were afraid to fight back. In 2001, an old-fashioned white, Southern man named Lee Swaney won the election for mayor of Clarkston. A year and a half later, the proposed relocation of around 700 Somali Bantu to Georgia, many of whom were traumatized, extremely poor, and spoke no English, pushed tensions in Clarkston to a breaking point. Congresswoman Feltz worried that splitting up the Somali refugees in different apartment complexes could lead to them feeling alienated and not knowing where to get help from the police or government if problems arose. Mayor Swaney contacted the refugee placement agency to see if they would answer questions at a town hall meeting in Clarkston, and the agency agreed.
The town hall occurred on March 31, 2003 with over a hundred Clarkston residents in attendance. Though Swaney had been hopeful that the meeting would inspire dialogue and transparency, the tone of the meeting was overwhelmingly negative, with some residents asking questions about how to keep the new refugees out of Clarkston and others accusing these people of being uncaring and racist.
Chapter 4: Alone Down South
Meanwhile, Luma settled into Decatur, Georgia just minutes away from Clarkston. She got a job waiting tables and applied for a job coaching the girls' soccer team at the YMCA. She used Coach Brown's model of working her soccer team extremely hard. The players who thought it was too tough dropped off the team, but the ones who stayed through the first season and into the second began to improve. At the end of Luma's third season with the team, they went undefeated and won the year-end tournament.
At the same time, Luma was still having to grapple with living without much money in the United States and the fact that her family would not answer her repeated attempts to contact them. When she was feeling very sad, she would get in her car and drive around Georgia. One day, she drove to a place that surprised her; she found women walking the streets in hijabs and a Middle Eastern market that had foods and smells she missed dearly. She soon became a regular of the store, but she still did not bother to investigate the community surrounding it.
Luma decided to open a cafe called Ashton's. It was hard work with long days, and on top of the new business she was still coaching girls' soccer at the YMCA. One afternoon as Luma drove to the Middle Eastern grocery store, she saw a group of children playing soccer in the parking lot of an apartment complex. She immediately noticed that the boys were of many different races and playing with a passion and joy that she recognized from her days watching and playing street soccer in Jordan. Luma parked her car and watched them play for over an hour. Another day, Luma came back with a new soccer ball and joined the boys, who thought it strange at first that an adult woman would want to play with them but allowed her to join them.
Gradually, Luma started coming more and more to play with the boys and got to know them and their families. As she started to compare the boys playing soccer in a parking lot whenever possible to the comparatively privileged girls she coached through the YMCA, she realized that she wanted to start a structured soccer program for the refugee children. The Y provided her some money to rent a field at a community center in Clarkston, so she made flyers for try-outs, translated them into French, Vietnamese, and Arabic, and then waited to see who would show up.
Chapter 5: The Fugees Are Born
Jeremiah Ziaty was very excited when he heard about the soccer tryouts, but his mother refused to let him go; she had been strict about him and his brothers coming home directly after school since she was mugged on her first day of work. However, Jeremiah was passionate enough about soccer to defy his mother.
Tryouts were held on the field of the Clarkston Community Center. The community center was run at that time by a man named Chris Holliday who wholeheartedly supported programs for refugees, which drew criticism from the public and even other members of the community center’s board. However, they knew that having a soccer program for refugees at the center was good publicity, so they kept quiet.
On the day of tryouts, Jeremiah set out for the community center while his mother was still at work. Twenty-three boys showed up for tryouts. Jeremiah got to the field, carefully took one sneaker out of his backpack, and put it on. The boys were initially skeptical of a female coach, but she proved herself to them by demonstrating her soccer skills and no-nonsense attitude. Jeremiah made the team and gained a nickname: One Shoe. When Beatrice Ziaty found out her son had gone to the tryouts, she was angry, but she allowed him to introduce her to Coach Luma. Luma and Beatrice agreed that the coach would drive Jeremiah to and from practices and generally take responsibility for him.
Practices began, and Luma began to realize how untrained she was to work with children with such a variety of traumas in their lives. Not only had many witnessed violence and poverty, but many also had limited English and formal education, meaning they struggled socially and academically in their new school. Luma came up with the idea to get volunteers to tutor the players before practices. Around this time, the team got the name "the Fugees" (69). People donated supplies such as jerseys and shoes, but in many cases they were not high quality. Luma began to teach organized game play to the boys, who had only ever played informally. She also navigated the racial and national divisions between players, realizing that if given the chance, they would split into cliques and perpetuate prejudice during practices. The coach also started to get to know the parents of the players better, and helped many of them by translating documents, making appointments, and even buying families food. Luma was still attempting to keep Ashton's running, but it was losing money, and she knew she needed to walk away. Even while she was closing her cafe, Luma had a new idea for a cleaning service staffed by refugee women to make sure the mothers of her players had stable work in the daytime and could be home with their children in the evenings. Finally, Luma had to quit coaching the girls' team at the YMCA so that she could focus entirely on the Fugees and the refugee community in Clarkston.
Chapter 6: "Coach Says It's Not Good"
The Ntwari family arrived in Clarkston in 2005. The Ntwari family consisted of a mother (Generose) and three sons (Bienvenue, Alex, and Ive). The family was from Burundi, and was relocated to Georgia by the International Rescue Committee. Burundi is one of the poorest countries in the world. A Tutsi minority ruled over a Hutu majority for many years until the country's first free election in 1993 produced a Hutu leader named Melchior Ndadaye. Ndadaye was assassinated just four months after the election, and a civil war broke out that resulted in the deaths of around 300,000 people in ten years. Many others, including the Ntwaris, fled the country; the Ntwari family ended up in a refugee camp in Mozambique and lived there for four years before having their application for resettlement accepted.
On the first morning in their new home, Bienvenue opened the front door and walked out into America not knowing what to expect. What he found was a boy named Grace Balegamire standing in the parking lot; the boys soon realized that they both spoke Swahili and Grace was able to tell Bien about the differences between Africa and the United States, the culture at Bien's new school, and the Fugees soccer team. Bien asked Grace to check with Coach Luma whether he could join the team, and Grace promised to come back after practice to report what she said. When Bienvenue went back inside his apartment, he told his brother that he hadn't thought there would be anyone they could play with in their new home.
That evening, Grace came back and told Bien that Coach Luma would allow him to practice with the team, even though it was the middle of the season. Alex could also join Luma's team for older boys. Bienvenue and Alex soon learned about Coach Luma's strict rules, which ranged from showing up on time and practicing hard to only speaking in English and forming groups for drills made up of players from different countries and backgrounds. The players, especially two older boys named Darlington and Peshawa, vied for Luma's attention, which she responded to by making them work together and treating them equally. The players even came to love Luma so much that they took on her personal qualities such as not eating pork.
Chapter 7: Get Lost
Early in 2006, the Clarkston Community Center started to have second thoughts about hosting the Fugees' soccer practices. Some board members believed that the refugee community benefited from their services while not contributing enough and even causing problems. In the spring of 2006, Luma received a call saying the Fugees would no longer be allowed to use the center's field. Luma found another field further away and was able to borrow a bus from the YMCA to transport the players, but she knew that it was only a temporary solution since it would start to get dark earlier in the fall and winter. She promised herself that she would find a better field after the season ended.
In the break after the end of the season, Luma went searching for a field that would be in walking distance of the players' apartments and suitable for soccer. She chose the field behind Indian Creek Elementary. It was not ideal due to its lack of grass and openness to the public, but it was close enough that the players would be able to get to practices relatively safely, had classrooms for Luma to run her tutoring program, and was free. Luma realized she would need help now that the program was growing. In 2005, a woman named Tracy Ediger moved to Georgia to work with refugees through an organization called Jubilee Partners. Tracy began tutoring the Fugee players in English for free in the summer of 2006. She also began to serve as the team manager, driving the players to games and helping Luma administratively.
Analysis
St. John shows the changing demographics of Clarkston by giving examples and statistics about restaurants, religious centers, and schools. A careful analysis of the attendance of religious centers in particular can show how Clarkston did not just increase its population of refugees, but also experienced "white flight" in which wealthy, white people leave an area as it becomes more diverse. The author writes, "A mosque opened up on Indian Creek Drive, just across the street from the elementary and high schools, and began to draw hundreds of worshipers... Attendance at the old Clarkston Baptist Church dwindled from around seven hundred to fewer than a hundred" (32). While one might expect that a mosque would open shortly after more Muslims arrive in a town, a huge decrease in attendance of a particular church shows how white, Christian citizens of Clarkston made the choice to move away.
Chapter 1, which focuses on Luma's life before starting the Fugees, allows the reader to compare and contrast her experience as an immigrant in America with the experiences of her players and their families. Luma came from a wealthy family in Jordan, so she had no problem learning English as a child and was able to go to the United States for university. Her wealth, international experience, and unaccented English allowed her to be accepted at her university without much prejudice, and she decided to stay in the United States primarily because of the better opportunities it afforded her as a woman. In comparison, the families of the Fugees players were forced from their countries and often struggled financially and socially in the United States. However, this does not mean Luma never faced discrimination or financial trouble because of being an immigrant; when her family cut off her money and she was living in the United States without documentation, she had to work low-paying jobs beneath her level of education. She also experienced missing the sights, tastes, and feelings of her home country, which in part led her to create the Fugees.
The role of mentors in one's life is also clear from Chapter 2 through the character of Rhonda Brown. Rhonda Brown was Luma's volleyball coach when she attended an international school in Amman. The coach was very strict about discipline, which led Luma to dislike her at first but to later really respect her. When Luma started coaching soccer, she used Coach Brown's methods of strict rules and a lot of running and drills, which led her teams to be successful and disciplined. Luma also became a role model and mentor to the Fugees, who perhaps will grow up to be coaches, leaders, and teachers themselves using similar methods.
By including the backstories of many of the families of players on the Fugees team, the author allows the reader to realize the extent of the violence and trauma refugees face before being resettled. Many of the families resettling in Clarkston were separated from family members, had violence inflicted upon them, lived in poverty in refugee camps, and had to wait for years to hear if they would be resettled at all. These facts make it even more difficult to accept that the refugee families living in Clarkston still faced problems of poverty and discrimination once living in their new homes.
Luma realizes that change must be made by volunteers at the local level when she is given little help by political and social organizations in Clarkston. At first, the Fugees are able to use the field at Clarkston Community Center, but that is taken from them before the end of their first season, and they must spend the rest of the book moving between fields in and around Clarkston that will permit use by the refugees. It is clear that the members of the City Council and the Board of the Community Center do not approve of the changes in Clarkston's demographics, and seek to use their political power to direct government and community spending toward white, wealthy residents of the town.
