Читать книгу Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town - Warren John St. - Страница 10

Luma Mufleh knew nothing of Clarkston or the refugees there when she moved to the nearby town of Decatur, only a few miles west of Clarkston down Ponce de Leon Avenue. Decatur was coming into its own as a liberal enclave in mostly conservative Atlanta. There was a groovy café, the Java Monkey, a bar specializing in European beer called the Brick Store Pub, and an old-school bohemian music venue called Eddie’s Attic. Luma found a job waiting tables. She made a few friends and, as if by reflex, began looking around for opportunities to coach football. As it happened, the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA, just down the road from the old courthouse and the home of one of the oldest youth football programs in the state, was looking for a coach for their fourteen-and-under girls’ team. Luma applied and got the job.

Luma coached the only way she knew how—by following the example set for her by Coach Brown. She was more demanding than any of the girls or their parents expected—she made her players run for thirty-five minutes and do sets of sit-ups, push-ups, and leg lifts before each practice. And she refused to coddle them. Luma explained to her girls that they would be responsible for their actions and for meeting their obligations to the team. Players who couldn’t make practice were expected to call Luma themselves; there would be no passing off the excuse-making to Mom or Dad. Likewise, if a player had problems with the way Luma ran the team—complaints about playing time, favoritism, or the like—she would be expected to raise those concerns directly with the coach.

Luma’s approach did not sit well with all of her players’ parents. Some were mystified as to why their daughters had to run themselves to exhaustion, while others couldn’t understand why Luma punished the girls—with extra laps or time on the bench—when their parents dropped them off late for practice.

Luma’s rule-making wasn’t entirely about establishing her authority over the team—though that was part of it. She also believed that the team would benefit once individual players started to take responsibility for themselves. Luma herself had been coddled by her parents in an atmosphere of privilege and entitlement, and believed that she had paid for these comforts by sacrificing her self-reliance and independence. If Luma was going to coach, she was going to do so with this basic lesson as a backdrop, whether her players’ parents understood it right away or not. Time would tell whether her approach produced results.

“Parents would get upset about certain things she did,” said Kim Miller, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, whose daughter Maritza played on Luma’s team for three years. “They’d say, ‘Oh—can you believe she made them run barefoot?’ or ‘Oh—can you believe she made them run laps because we were stuck in traffic?’ Luma was really tough. They had to take responsibility for what they did. If you were angry with the coach, it wasn’t ‘Go home and tell your mom.’ She didn’t want to hear from the mommies. She wanted the girls to be responsible.”

When confronted by unhappy parents, Luma displayed a confidence incongruous with her status as a newcomer, an attitude that put off some parents and intrigued others. Once when Luma ordered her players to practice barefoot to get a better feel for the football, a team mother objected on the grounds that her daughter might injure her toes.

“This is how I run my practice,” Luma told her. “If she’s not going to do it, she’s not going to play.”

During Luma’s first season as coach, her team lost every game. But over time, her methods began to pay off. Dedicated players returned, and those who didn’t buy in left. The players worked hard and improved. They stopped questioning Luma’s methods and began to absorb and intuit them. In her third season, Luma’s twelve-and-under girls’ team went undefeated and won their year-end tournament.

The players and parents who went through that experience speak about it now in near mystical terms.

“I don’t usually use this word,” said Kim Miller, Maritza’s mother. “But it was magical. She helped cultivate them and truly gave them more skills than football. She helped them thrive.”

Now fifteen and an active footballer, Maritza Miller describes her time on Luma’s team as life changing. “She realized from the start that it’s not something just on the field,” Maritza said. “It’s about trust. None of my other coaches thought that way.”

LUMA MADE THE team the focus of her energies in those early days in Georgia. But however fulfilling, coaching football couldn’t distract Luma from frequent bouts of homesickness for her friends and family. She still wasn’t speaking to her parents, who would hang up the phone on her if she ever called home, and she missed her younger sister Inam, who was now a teenager and no longer the little girl Luma remembered. Then in 2002, Luma’s grandmother Munawar, her lifeline to her family, died in Jordan.

When Luma was grieving, her preferred therapy was to get into her daffodil yellow Volkswagen Beetle, put on some music—something fast and peppy—and simply drive. She didn’t particularly know her way around Atlanta, but the unfamiliar surroundings—the strange mixture of gleaming glass office buildings, columned houses, stucco McMansions, and long, desolate stretches of worn-out row houses—distracted her with a sense of discovery. In Atlanta, one could traverse gaping boundaries of race and class by simply crossing a street.

On one of those trips, Luma found herself lost in what seemed to be a run-down area beyond the eastern side of the Perimeter, only a few miles east of Decatur. What she saw confused her. Amid the decrepit apartment complexes, the soulless strip malls, the gas stations, and the used-car dealerships, there were women walking the streets in chadors and hijabs and others in colorful African robes and headdresses. Luma came upon a small grocery store with a sign indicating that it was a Middle Eastern market called Talars. She pulled into the parking lot, went in, and took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the old familiar smells of cardamom, turmeric, and cumin. Luma could hardly believe it. She stocked up on groceries—pita bread, hummus, and halloumi, a salty sheep and goat’s milk cheese that was one of Luma’s favorites—then went home to make herself a meal like her grandmother might’ve made.

Luma became a regular customer at Talars, and each time she visited she again confronted the strange sight of African and Middle Eastern dress on the streets. She had discovered Clarkston the way most Atlantans did—by accident—and like most of the people who drove through Clarkston, Luma was too preoccupied with her own worries to give much thought to the unusual tableau around her.

LUMA ALSO HAD to make a living, and waiting tables wasn’t bringing in the sort of income she needed to survive in Atlanta. Neither did it suit her nature. Luma was better at giving instructions than taking them. She looked into the possibility of opening a franchise of an ice cream parlor chain, and when that didn’t pan out, decided to start her own business, a café that sold ice cream and sandwiches, a place where people could spend the day and relax without being hassled. She found an available storefront in downtown Decatur midway between her apartment and the YMCA, and cobbled together a group of investors from the friends and contacts she’d made around Atlanta, including some of the parents of her players at the Y. In 2003 Luma opened her own café—Ashton’s, named after a friend’s dog—in an out-of-the-way building in Decatur alongside the still busy Atlanta-to-Athens railroad line.

Running Ashton’s was tough. Luma found herself putting in sixteen-hour days, preparing food early in the morning and cleaning up late after the close. It was lonely work, but Luma had taken on the challenge of succeeding, for herself and for her investors. She still wasn’t speaking with her parents in Jordan, and her desire to prove her independence to her family back home drove her to work even harder. But the plan wasn’t working out. Ashton’s was too far off the beaten path in Decatur to lure in enough customers to make money, and Luma found herself working longer and longer hours to keep the place afloat. She was still coaching her girls’ team in the evenings, and she was exhausted.

One afternoon Luma decided to drive to Talars to pick up some of her favorite foods from back home. Distracted by her anxiety over losses at Ashton’s, she inadvertently drove past the store, and had to make a U-turn in the parking lot of a dreary old apartment complex called the Lakes. While turning around, she came across a group of boys playing football on the asphalt. From behind her windshield she could see the boys playing the game with the sweaty mixture of passion, joy, and camaraderie she recognized from the games played in the empty lot on the other side of the fence from her grandmother’s house in Amman. But unlike in Amman, the boys playing in Clarkston seemed to come from a confusion of backgrounds—they were white, black, and brown. Luma parked her car and watched.

“I stayed there for over an hour,” she recalled. “They were barefoot but they were having such a good time.”

The sight of boys of so many ethnicities in one place began to open Luma’s eyes to what was happening in Clarkston, just down the road from her own home. She asked friends about Clarkston, including a woman she’d met in Decatur who worked with refugees at one of the resettlement agencies. Luma began to learn the particulars of the difficulties refugees faced upon arriving in the United States. At the time, thousands of refugees had already been resettled in and around Clarkston, and more were coming every month.

“I’d never questioned why they had a Middle Eastern grocery store in Clarkston,” she said. “I knew there were refugees, but I had no clue about the numbers.”

On another trip to the grocery store in Clarkston, Luma pulled into the same parking lot. A game was under way. Luma reached into the backseat and retrieved a football, then got out of her car, approached the boys, and asked if she could join in. The boys were wary. She was a stranger—a grown-up and a woman to boot. There were all manner of crazies in the apartment complexes in Clarkston—maybe she was one of those. But Luma also had a new ball, and the one the boys were playing with was scuffed and ragged. They reluctantly allowed her to join in. Once the game started, the boys saw that Luma could play. She set them up with quick passes and broke up attacks on her team’s goal. Soon, Luma was running herself sweaty, pleasantly lost in a game with strangers. It was a rare moment of connection in a world that for Luma still seemed impenetrable and socially separate.

“It reminded me what I missed about my community at home,” she said. “And at the time I felt like such an outsider.”

OVER THE NEXT few weeks and months, Luma continued to stop in at the Lakes on her trips to Talars. She was getting to know the boys, learning bits about their pasts and their families’ struggles. Some had just arrived and spoke little English. Her Arabic and functional French helped her communicate with kids from the Middle East and Sudan, as well as the Congo and Burundi. They began to open up, gradually, about their lives. Luma learned that the boys lived in all kinds of improvised family arrangements, often not with parents but with uncles, aunts, and cousins. In snatches of conversation she got a glimpse of the boys’ isolation from the new world around them and their desire to connect. The loneliness that resulted from being uprooted was something that Luma intuitively understood. Luma also learned that kick-arounds on the town’s parking lots were the only kind of football the refugee kids could afford; even the modest fees required to play football at the local public schools were prohibitively high for most of the boys’ families.

Luma couldn’t help but notice how much more passionate these boys were for the game compared to the girls she coached at the YMCA. They played whenever they could, as opposed to when they had to, and they didn’t need the trappings of a football complex or the structure of a formal practice to get inspired. Luma decided that the kids really needed a free football program of their own. She didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to start or run such a program. She certainly couldn’t fund it, and with a restaurant to run and a team of her own to coach, she hardly had time to spare. But the more she played football in the parking lots around Clarkston and the more she learned about the kids there, the more she felt a nagging urge to engage, and to do something.

Eventually, Luma floated the idea of starting a small, low-key football program for the refugees to the mother of one of her players, who was on the board at the YMCA. To her surprise, the Y offered to commit enough money to rent the field at the community center in Clarkston and to buy equipment. Luma figured she could devote a few hours a week to a football program and still keep Ashton’s running. She decided to give it a try. With the help of some friends, Luma crafted a flyer announcing football trials at the Clarkston Community Center, in English, Vietnamese, Arabic, and French. She made copies and on a warm early summer day drove around Clarkston in her Volkswagen and posted the flyers in the apartment complexes. She wasn’t sure that anyone would show up.