In 2005, through the Balegamire family, Luma had met a Nebraskan named Tracy Ediger who had moved to Georgia to work with refugees. Ediger had grown up on a corn and soybean farm west of Lincoln in a strict evangelical Christian family. She and her three sisters attended church three times a week, rarely watched television growing up, and had each enrolled at Christian colleges after high school. Tracy studied biochemistry and French as an undergraduate and had gone on to pursue an MD-PhD at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, an intensive eight-year degree that portended a career as a doctor or medical researcher. But the program had worn her down. Deprived of sleep and surrounded by the gravely ill and the dying, Tracy began to fear that she was losing her capacity for empathy.
“I was tired and exhausted and I started to feel like I was numb to everything,” she said. “It was like, ‘Uh-oh. What have I gotten myself into?’”
Tracy completed her degree but along the way realized that a career in medicine wasn’t for her. But she didn’t have the faintest idea of what else she might do with her life. After graduation, she got in her car and drove to Maine, where she worked temporary jobs and waited for a kind of eureka moment to give clarity to her career search. But that moment never came.
“I was trying to figure out what I was going to do, and I came up with nothing,” Tracy recalled. “And I’m supposed to be making plans for the rest of my life.”
Tracy headed south to be with one of her sisters, who had decided to volunteer at Jubilee Partners, a Christian-run facility in the woods near Comer, Georgia, that serves as a transition point for refugee families who have just arrived in the United States. Tracy joined up as well and spent time teaching English to just-arrived Somali Bantu refugees for fifteen dollars a week. The experience, she said, was cathartic. While Tracy fretted over her own career, she was working with people who had been through dislocation and war and who still managed to show kindness to the strangers around them.
“You’d sit on the porch, and you wouldn’t be able to talk but somehow you always felt welcome,” she said. “In spite of what they’ve been through and despite our lack of commonality, they were all generous and friendly and open. It’s very different than the way that people live in the U.S. because we’re so driven and we’re so busy all the time.”
At Jubilee, Tracy said, she began to see the stress she felt about her own career in a different light.
“It made me feel that my questions were not nearly as important as I’d made them out to be,” she said.
Tracy worked at Jubilee on that fifteen-dollar-a-week salary on and off for the next year and a half. Along the way, she would go to Atlanta to check on refugees who had passed through Jubilee during their resettlement in Clarkston, people like Paula Balegamire from Congo, whose sons Grace and Josue now played for Luma on the Fugees. Through Paula, Tracy met Luma, who idly mentioned that she was looking for a coordinator for her soccer program—someone who could handle logistics and head the tutoring operation. Tracy was reticent; as a country girl she had no intention of moving to a big city like Atlanta, but she kept running into Luma through Paula’s family. Each time, Luma mentioned that she was looking for help. As Luma and Tracy got to know each other, they found they had something powerful in common.
“We had the same feeling that with refugee families we felt at home in a way that we didn’t feel in the rest of our lives,” she said.
Tracy was still on the fence in the spring of 2006 when she went to watch the Fugees play and to cheer on Grace. She found the soccer mildly interesting, but there was a moment after the game that particularly affected her. The players were walking off the field at an old football stadium where youth soccer games were now played, when Tracy spotted Grace, a boy she had met just after his family had arrived in the United States and who she recalled as shy and scared.
“I was standing at the top of the stadium watching the kids walking up the steps and I saw the look on Grace’s face and the way he was interacting with his teammates,” Tracy said. “He was smiling this big smile and looked really happy. I thought to myself, ‘I could do a tutoring program for these kids.’”
In the summer of 2006, Tracy agreed to join the Fugees for a year. She would have no salary—but she had no debts, and her car, an old 1990 Chevrolet S-10 pickup she’d bought from her father for $900, was paid for. Tracy figured she could pick up a part-time job in Atlanta to make ends meet. For the Fugees, she would serve as team manager, a job that included everything from driving the YMCA’s bus to running tutoring sessions for Luma’s players. She would also apply the research skills she’d honed in graduate school to ferreting out funding opportunities and grants for the program. Beyond that, Tracy figured she’d make it up as she went along. In retrospect, she said, she didn’t quite realize what she was getting into.
“I didn’t have any idea that this would take over my life,” she said.
IN LATE JULY, Luma set about a familiar task. She called a few of her established players to let them know about tryouts, though for the most part, that wasn’t necessary. Luma’s voice mail was full of messages from her kids asking when soccer would begin. She returned the calls, and soon, word spread around the parking lots and apartment complexes around town. Tryouts for the Fugees’ fall season would take place the second week of August, dust and chaos be damned.
A NEW SEASON
Chapter Ten
“I Want to Be Part of the Fugees!”
For most of the Fugees, tryouts meant the end of weeks of tedium. There was little to do in Clarkston in the summers but sweat. Bienvenue, Alex, and Ive—the brothers from Burundi—for example, had no bikes with which to get around town to see their friends. The pool at their apartment complex was closed and sat empty. (A spate of drownings by refugee children in Clarkston had prompted many of the landlords to drain their pools—hiring lifeguards was just too expensive.) The boys had a television, but no cable. They mostly passed the time in the apartment with their mother, Generose, and baby sister, Alyah, watching blurry videos of Burundian drummers and Congolese choirs singing Christian hymns.
“We just stayed at home,” Bien said, describing his summer. “We didn’t do nothing. Without soccer, life was boring.”
Bien could hardly wait for tryouts. There wasn’t much drama in it for him—he knew that as a one-year veteran he would make the team. But he was curious to see what kind of new talent showed up from the complexes around town, and to see the team’s new field. Bien had grown up playing soccer in a refugee camp in Mozambique on a patch of bare earth with goals marked by small piles of rocks. He had been impressed with the field at the Clarkston Community Center. It had grass, proper soccer goals with nets, and lights overhead that allowed for practice when the sun set early in the fall. And he appreciated the grassy fields of the Fugees’ competitors. By far his favorite, though, had been a field of artificial turf he’d played on at one away match. It was fast, and shots and passes rolled especially true on the smooth surface. When Bien got the word that tryouts would be at the field behind Indian Creek Elementary, he stopped by to have a look.
“Wow,” he thought. “It’s like Africa.”
AS WORD OF the upcoming Fugees tryouts spread around Clarkston, kids began to prepare. Some went jogging to get in shape. The pickup games in the parking lots around town began to attract more players and to get more intense. It wasn’t just that the Fugees were the only free soccer program in Clarkston (even the teams at the public schools required fees these boys’ families couldn’t afford). More than that, the Fugees offered a chance to play the game the way the pros did—on a grand scale, in a big open space with room for beautiful crosses, arcing corner kicks, and long, elegant shots that blistered the tips of the keeper’s fingers. The Fugees had practices and uniforms and they traveled all over the state, no small enticement to kids who rarely left Clarkston at all. As important to the boys, their parents understood that soccer with Luma was safe, unlike the games in the parking lots of the apartme
nt complexes, which often took place in the menacing presence of drug dealers and young men with too much time on their hands.
AS TRYOUTS APPROACHED, Luma began to worry about her rosters. She would be coaching three different teams within the Fugees program—the Under 13 Fugees, for boys thirteen and younger, the Under 15s, and the Under 17s. There were veteran players returning to each squad—Bien, Grace, and Jeremiah on the Under 13s, for example, Alex Nicishatse, Bien’s older brother, and Mandela Ziaty on the Under 15s, with team leaders Kanue Biah from Liberia and Natnael Mammo from Ethiopia. But Luma faced the perennial struggle of fortifying the ranks of each team with newcomers, few of whom had ever played organized soccer, and finding a way to get all of her players—rookies and veterans—to play together as a team.
First and foremost, Luma needed players who would show up to practices and games on their own, since their parents—who were already overwhelmed—would not likely be of much help. The boys had to be willing to walk long distances if necessary, and to wake themselves up and get ready for games early on weekend mornings, without the help of parents. They would have to be self-sufficient, or learn to become so.
After the trauma of war and relocation, many refugee kids had severe psychological and behavioral problems. Luma had to keep this in mind during her assessments. She had learned from experience that she needed about a third of her players to be well-adjusted kids from stable families. They would set an example for the others and give the team a foundation. Another third of the team would be boys who were for the most part dependable even if they had occasional problems at school or with other kids. The last third would be marginal cases, those with behavioral problems and unstable families. These were the boys who could be counted on to demand the bulk of Luma’s energy and who would most likely threaten the cohesion of her teams. They were also the boys who needed the Fugees the most.
LUMA’S THREE TEAMS had their own needs and aspirations. The Under 17s were the most mature, and would cause Luma the least amount of trouble. In previous seasons, most of the problem players had left or been kicked off the team. A few players on the Under 17s had cars. Luma expected this team to take care of itself.
The Under 13 Fugees, Luma’s youngest team, consisted of a group of boys who had been with her from her first season two years before. Some, like Jeremiah, had been with Luma since her very first week of tryouts. Others, like Bienvenue, had joined along the way and made the team the center of their new lives in the United States. Their youth made them the most malleable and the most responsive to Luma’s strict discipline. She knew their mothers well, relationships that extended Luma’s authority to the boys’ homes, since she frequently coordinated with the mothers when the boys acted out or broke the rules. The Under 13s had a star left forward in Josiah Saydee, another Liberian, whose awkward, toes-first gait masked amazing speed, as well as an experienced center midfielder in Qendrim Bushi, a stylish, mosquito-legged Kosovar with a penchant for wearing bright-colored bandanas around his neck during practice. The Under 13s’ weakness was on defense. The team’s best defenders hadn’t returned this season, and so Luma had to find replacements from the pool of boys who turned up for tryouts.
The team was also weak at goalie—desperately so—but that was a condition of Luma’s choosing. Her goalies were Eldin Subasic, a Bosnian refugee and Qendrim’s best friend, and Mafoday Jawneh, a heavyset refugee from Gambia with a halogen-bulb smile and a sentimental streak—his older brother teased him for his habit of getting teary-eyed during sappy episodes of Oprah. A goalie, even in youth soccer, needs both aggressiveness and a degree of recklessness, qualities utterly lacking in Eldin and Mafoday, both gentle, happy souls. Their combined vertical jump came to less than a foot. And yet, the two boys did everything Luma ever asked of them. They came to practice on time, didn’t miss games, studied hard during the afternoon tutoring sessions Luma required her players to attend, and supported their teammates on and off the field, qualities that assured inclusion on the Fugees roster more than did simple athletic ability. If the boys created a weak link in the Under 13s defense, the rest of the team would simply have to work harder on the field to reinforce them. And if they did, Luma felt her team had a chance to win their division.
THE UNDER 15s were a different story. They had an incredibly talented pool of players—if they decided to show up. Earlier in the summer, Luma had sent the word around that she expected her players to get their hair cut short. Luma wanted the Fugees to look respectable. The news of the hair rule, though, hadn’t gone over well with some of the Under 15s’ best players. Prince, for example, a cat-quick Liberian and one of the team’s best returning players, had spent the summer cultivating a crown of perfectly proportioned braids that traversed his head and dangled down the back of his neck in the style of Allen Iverson, the NBA point guard. The braids gained Prince a measure of respect among his peers at school; girls liked them, and they hinted at gang affiliation, or at least comfort with a dangerous realm of many of his American peers. Prince had no intention of cutting his hair. He knew he was talented at soccer, and he fully expected Luma to make an exception to get him on the team. Further, some of the other players—particularly fellow Liberians such as Mandela Ziaty and Fornatee Tarpeh—looked up to Prince. If he was kicked off the team, there was a chance they might quit in solidarity.
“Some people want short hair, some people want braids,” Fornatee said. “We don’t all want to be the same. We want to be different. And playing soccer doesn’t have anything to do with your hair.”
The hair issue spoke to the bigger challenges facing the Under 15s. They were in the throes of adolescence, their moods subject to the disorienting flood of hormones that can turn even the most welladjusted kids into moody rebels. Like teenagers everywhere, they longed for the respect of their peers and craved a sense of belonging, a concept especially fraught for young refugees and immigrants who were caught between the world of their parents and the new world of their friends and schoolmates. The boys on the Under 15s felt the conflict between the two worlds more acutely than their younger siblings, if only because they had spent more time in their home countries, which was borne out in the older boys’ thicker accents and fondness for the native dress of their parents, proclivities that sometimes drew ridicule from the American kids at school. Even choosing to play soccer had implications for a teenager’s social standing in Clarkston. Soccer was the game of refugees, Latino immigrants, and white kids from the suburbs. American kids in Clarkston and inner-city Atlanta played basketball. Soccer wasn’t cool.
And finally, there was the lure of gangs, which promised both belonging and status. There were gangs in all of the public middle and high schools around Clarkston—Crips, Bloods, even an African American gang that called themselves the Taliban. Luma had lost more than one of the teenage Fugees to gangs in the past; she knew she would be competing against the gangs again this season.
If Luma could find a way to keep the Under 15 Fugees focused, and if she could find a way to create a sense of belonging and camaraderie through the team that kept the boys away from corrupting influences in Clarkston, she felt the boys were capable of playing incredible soccer. It was this team that had beaten another 9–2 the previous spring, silencing that team’s extra-vocal coach and drawing an expression of awe from the referee that afternoon. Luma thought the Under 15s might win their division, and she hoped to enter them at season’s end in the Georgia State Cup, a tournament for the region’s best clubs. But a couple of the team’s leaders were not returning; they’d moved away from Clarkston, to new lives elsewhere in the United States. Luma would have to see what kind of talent turned up. Tryouts were a day away.
IT WAS A broiling August afternoon in Atlanta, the sort of weather that long ago prompted people in these parts to start drinking their tea on ice, when Luma stepped onto the field and looked over the group of boys who had turned up for tryouts. They were a raggedy bunch. These kids arrived in blue jeans, long T-shirts, and baggy s
horts that looked like pajama bottoms. One wore ankle-high brown hiking boots, as if he were about to go mountain climbing, while another stood ready to play in his socks, which flopped like clown shoes when he ran.
Luma took down the names and ages of the prospective players, and with the help of the team manager, Tracy, wrote their names on strips of masking tape, which they plastered across the backs of the boys’ T-shirts. Luma had a few extra sets of used soccer shoes; she waved over the young man in sock feet and placed her foot next to his as a reference. In two years of coaching the Fugees, Luma had learned to eyeball a young man’s shoe size with the accuracy of an old cobbler.
“You’re a seven,” she said to the boy before tossing him a pair of shoes.
Luma divided the boys into two groups and told them she wanted to see them play. As the boys took the field, she cleared her throat, squinted against the platinum glare of an August afternoon, and tried to stifle the negative thought that had been nagging her since tryouts began: This is a rotten place to play soccer.
The “field” looked worse than it did the day Luma first saw it. Summer thunderstorms had carved ruts into the baked earth, exposing bits of gravel and shelves of sandstone in the process. A salting of broken glass from edge to edge glinted in the summer sun. There was a smattering of grass that took root in hard red clay around the perimeter, but most of the playing surface was dug out of dry Georgia chalk. White puffs of dust were released beneath the boys’ every footfall and pivot, until the field was obscured by a cloud of dry, choking dust that resembled fog.
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