Читать книгу Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town - Warren John St. - Страница 11

Perhaps no one in Clarkston was as excited to hear about the prospect of a free football program as eight-year-old Jeremiah Ziaty. Jeremiah loved football. Since arriving in the United States with his mother, Beatrice, and older brothers, Mandela and Darlington, Jeremiah had been cooped up in his family’s Clarkston apartment on strict orders from his mother. She was protective to begin with, but after she was mugged on her very first commute home from her job at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Beatrice had taken a hard line. She wanted the boys inside when they got home from school. When Jeremiah asked his mother if he could try out for the new football team in town, she was unyielding.

“Certainly I say, Jeremiah,” Beatrice told him, “you won’t play football every day.”

But football was one of the few things that could tempt Jeremiah into defying his mother.

TRIALS WERE TO be held on the field of the Clarkston Community Center, a dilapidated brick and cream-colored clapboard building on Indian Creek Drive that had once served as the old Clarkston High School before being abandoned by the county in 1982. The building and property were refurbished in 1994, complete with a spiffy playing field in the back, by a group of Clarkston boosters who wanted a community center for the town. At the time, the center was run by an energetic African American named Chris Holliday, who early on found that though the community center was governed by a board of trustees made up mostly of longtime Clarkston residents, it was the refugee community that seemed to embrace the center with special zeal. Cooped up in small apartments around town, they were desperate for any place to go, eager to meet neighbors—or even better, real American locals—and they signed up for English and computer classes in large numbers. As Holliday was running these programs inside the community center building, the field out back was going largely unused. When it came to figuring out what sort of activities should take place on the field, Holliday said, the refugees were nearly unanimous.

“Overwhelmingly,” he said, “the refugee community kept saying ‘We need football.’”

When the community center offered a football program for young kids, Holliday said, there was no question about which group—Americans or refugees—was more intent on playing.

“Refugee parents ran to get their kids enrolled,” he said, laughing at the memory. “I mean, we had moms signing people up.”

Along the way, though, some longtime residents on the board of the community center began to question Holliday’s focus on programs for refugees. Like so much in Clarkston, the community center was becoming a chit in the battle over the town’s identity. Art Hansen, a professor of migration studies at nearby Clark Atlanta University and a volunteer on the community center board in those days, said that he and other advocates for the refugees had begun to think of the community center as a kind of “refugee town hall.” But at a dedication ceremony for the football pitch out back, Hansen said, he learned that not everyone in Clarkston felt the same way. When Hansen mentioned his delight at seeing a group of refugee children take the field to play football, he was rebuked by a couple of Clarkston residents who served on the center’s board and the city council.

“They very clearly said they didn’t like all these newcomers here,” Hansen recalled. “There was this clear other sentiment saying, ‘This is the old Clarkston High School. This is a Clarkston building. This belongs to the old Clarkston—the real Clarkston. Not these newcomers.’”

Emanuel Ransom, the black Pennsylvanian who had moved to Clarkston in the 1960s, had worked hard to turn the old Clarkston High School into a community center and served on its board. He felt strongly that the newcomers didn’t do their part to chip in to keep the center running, and resented that the place he’d worked hard to create was becoming so closely identified with refugees.

“I’ve never been a refugee,” Ransom explained to me over a coffee at the local Waffle House one morning, in a version of a complaint I would hear many times in Clarkston. “But I know when I was in a foreign country, I almost had to learn their culture to survive, to eat. I didn’t have to become a citizen or anything—speak the language fluently—but I had to do things to get by. And I wasn’t asking for anything. Anything I wanted, I had to learn it or earn it.”

With the refugees at the community center, Ransom said, “Nobody wants to help—it’s just give me, give me, give me.”

But there was one reason that even the most xenophobic community center supporters grudgingly accepted the idea of a refugee football program on the new field out back: it was great PR to the world outside of Clarkston. The community center depended largely on foundation grants for funds, and grant applications featuring support of refugee programs had proven successful in securing donations for the center’s budget. The fact that Luma’s program was funded by the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA, which paid the community center for use of its field, didn’t prevent the community center from billing itself as a home to a refugee football program, even if many of the center’s board members would have preferred the facility to focus on programs for what Emanuel Ransom called “real Americans.”

LUMA HAD LITTLE appreciation for the degree to which the community center—the home of her new football program—had become embroiled in the battle over Clarkston’s identity when she pulled her Volkswagen Beetle into the center’s parking lot on a sunny June afternoon in 2004, before her team’s first trials. She was uncertain too about what kind of response her flyers would generate among the boys in the complexes around Clarkston. They were naturally wary. A church in town offered a free youth basketball program that doubled as a Christian outreach operation, a fact that offended Muslim families who had dropped in unawares. Luma didn’t know what to expect.

But on the other side of town, Jeremiah Ziaty left no doubt about his enthusiasm for the new team. His mother was still at work when he set out from the family’s apartment, a small backpack on his shoulder, ready to play.

When Jeremiah arrived, he joined twenty-two other boys on the small field out back of the community center. On the touchline, he unzipped his backpack carefully, as though it contained a fragile and precious artifact, which in a way it did: a single black oversized sneaker. Jeremiah took off his flip-flops and slipped the shoe on his right foot, leaving his left foot bare, and took the field.

Before trials began, a sense of puzzlement seemed to settle on the boys: Where, they wondered, was the coach? Luma was right in front of them, but a woman football coach was a strange sight to young Africans, and especially to the young Muslim boys from Afghanistan and Iraq. During shooting practice at an early training session, Luma was instructing the boys on how to strike the ball with the tops of their feet when she overheard a lanky Sudanese boy talking to the others.

“She’s a girl,” he said. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

Luma ordered him to stand in goal. She took off her shoes as the boy waited beneath the crossbar, rocking back and forth and growing more anxious by the moment. She asked for a ball, which she placed on the grass. Then, barefoot, as the team looked on, she blasted a shot directly at the boy, who dove out of the way as the ball rocketed into the net.

Luma turned toward her team.

“Anybody else?” she asked.

ON THAT FIRST day of trials, Jeremiah, in particular, played with all of the joyful abandon you might expect of an eight-year-old who had been stuck inside for months in a dark two-bedroom apartment. Soon the other boys had given him a nickname—One Shoe—which Jeremiah didn’t seem to mind in the least. At the end of the practice, he took his shoe off, carefully wiped it down, and placed it in his backpack before slipping on his flip-flops and starting the two-mile walk back home.

“See you later, Coach,” he said to Luma as he left the field.

“See you later, One Shoe,” she said.

WHEN BEATRICE ZIATY found out her son was sneaking off to play football with strangers after school, all hell broke loose.

“You’re too small,” Beatrice scolded him. “Don’t go out of the house!”

Jeremiah started to cry. And he cried. He begged his mother to let him play, but Beatrice held her ground. She wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to her son. And she certainly wasn’t going to be defied—after all she’d done to get the family here. Inside, though, Beatrice was torn. She knew an eight-year-old boy needed to run, to get outside. She knew it wasn’t fair to keep him confined to a small apartment all the time.

“You say you have a coach,” she finally said to Jeremiah. “Why you can’t bring the coach to me to see?”

“Momma,” he said, “I will bring her.”

The conversation took place outside, in front of the Ziatys’ apartment. Luma came in her Beetle and parked out front. Beatrice walked outside with Jeremiah and explained her concerns to Coach Luma: She wanted to know that her son would be safe and with an adult. She wanted to know how to get in touch with Luma if something went wrong. And she wanted to make sure that Jeremiah wasn’t walking alone through Clarkston.

“She did the bulk of the talking,” Luma recalled. “She said that Jeremiah was her baby and she wanted to know where he was going.”

Luma promised to pick Jeremiah up before practice and to drop him off afterward. He wouldn’t have to walk alone. She gave Beatrice her cell number and promised to be reachable.

“I’ll treat him like he’s my own kid,” Luma told her. “He’s going to be my responsibility.”

Beatrice agreed to give the situation a try. Jeremiah climbed into Luma’s Volkswagen and sat among the footballs and bright orange plastic cones strewn about—she used the car as a mobile equipment locker—and together they were off to practice. One Shoe had no intention of letting his mother down.

IN THOSE EARLY practices, Luma made a point not to ask her players about their pasts. The football pitch, she felt, should be a place where they could leave all that behind. But occasionally, as the kids became more comfortable with her, they would reveal specifics about their experiences in ways that underscored the lingering effects of those traumas. Luma learned that Jeremiah, for example, had been at home the night that his father was killed. Once, in an early practice, Luma expressed frustration that a young Liberian player seemed to suddenly zone out during play. Another Liberian who knew the boy told her she didn’t understand: the boy had been forced by soldiers to shoot a close friend. Luma wasn’t a social worker, and she had no background in dealing with profound psychological trauma. In such moments, she felt perilously in over her head.

“How do you react when someone tells you he saw his father get killed?” she said. “I didn’t know.”

Luma picked up on another problem facing her young players. Many had come from societies that had been fractured by war, and as a consequence they never had access to any kind of formal education. It wasn’t uncommon for some refugee children to be both illiterate in their native languages and innumerate—they had never learned the simplest math skills. Without this basic education in their own languages, they were playing catch-up in schools where classes were taught in a new language many of the boys could barely understand, if at all. While the public school system around Clarkston offered English-as-a-second-language programs, the schools were overwhelmed with newcomers. To move students through the system, many refugees were placed in standard classes that, while appropriate for their ages, did not take into account their lack of schooling or their deficiencies in English. The clock was ticking on these young students; if they didn’t get help and find a way to succeed in school, they would fail out or simply get too old for high school, at which point they would be on their own. Given the enthusiasm for football in the refugee community, Luma wondered if perhaps the game and her team could be an enticement for after-school tutoring that might give young refugees a better chance to succeed. She resolved to get help from volunteers and educators for tutoring before practices, and to require her players to attend or else lose their spots on her team.

Somewhere along the way, the team got a name: the Fugees. Luma was unsure of who exactly came up with the name, which many opposing teams assumed was a reference to the hip-hop band. But in fact it was simply short for “refugees.” The name stuck, and over time began to take on its own meaning among the kids in Clarkston, one separate from its etymology. In Clarkston, the Fugees meant football.

That first season, the Fugees played in a recreational, or “rec,” league, an informal division teams were required to play in before they could be admitted to more formal competition in the “select” grouping. There wasn’t much of an equipment budget, so Luma relied on donations, which didn’t always work out. A batch of jerseys given to the Fugees turned out to be absurdly large, like nightshirts. Someone donated a box of old boots, which Luma distributed to her players. When one of those players went to kick the ball, the sole of his boot went flying into the air to hysterical laughter from his teammates; the boots were so old that the glue holding them together had rotted. Luma stoically refused to acknowledge the equipment problems, at least to her players. She didn’t want them to get discouraged by what they didn’t have. She even made a point of wearing the same clothes to practices and games—football shorts, a ratty green T-shirt, and her dingy Smith baseball cap—because she noticed her players almost always wore the same clothes themselves.

Luma began the work of trying to make a competitive team out of her young recruits. She had to teach them the basics of organized play—how to take throw-ins, how to stay onside. But soon enough, a far bigger challenge began to reveal itself. Luma noticed that when she would tell the boys to divide into groups for drills, they would instinctively divide themselves according to their ethnic backgrounds or common languages. In practice games, boys would overlook open teammates to pass to their own kind. And each group, she learned, had its own prejudices toward others.

“The Afghan and Iraqi kids would look down at the African kids,” Luma said. “And kids from northern Africa would look down at kids from other parts of Africa. There was a lot of underlying racism and a lot of baggage they brought with them.”

Somehow, Luma would have to find a way to get kids from so many cultures and backgrounds to play as a unit.

“It was about trying to figure out what they have in common,” she said.

WHILE LUMA WAS trying to find a way to get the kids to play together, she was also getting to know their parents, mostly single mothers. She found they needed help—in understanding immigration documents, bills, school registration, and the like. With her Arabic and French, she was able to translate documents and find help through the network of people she was getting to know in the resettlement community. She arranged appointments with doctors and social workers. Luma gave her cell phone number out to her players and their families, and soon they were calling with requests for help negotiating their new lives. Teachers learned to call Luma during crises when her players’ parents couldn’t be found or were at work. All the while, Luma began to marvel at the impact of even the simplest of gestures on her part. The families were extraordinarily grateful, which they showed by offering Luma tea and inviting her to dinners. Luma found herself both appreciated and needed, and couldn’t help but notice how much more fulfilling this kind of work was than running Ashton’s. In fact, Ashton’s was losing money—and fast. Luma faced the possibility of having to close and even of declaring bankruptcy. The stress, she said, was overwhelming. She didn’t want to disappoint her investors, and she had wanted more than anything to prove to her parents back home that she was capable of succeeding on her own.

“I had never failed like that before,” she said. “There was a lot of shame. It was my friends who had invested in the business. Filing for bankruptcy at the age of twenty-eight was not something I had aspired to do. I was as low as when I had gotten cut off from my family. Nothing was going right.”

One afternoon Luma was driving Jeremiah home when he let slip that he was hungry. Luma told him he should eat when he got home, but Jeremiah said there wasn’t any food there—that it was, in his words, “that time of the month.” It was a curious phrase for a nine-year-old boy. Luma probed, and Jeremiah explained that at a certain time each month, food stamps ran out. The family had to go hungry until another batch arrived. Luma was floored. She had understood that her players’ families were poor, but she hadn’t realized that they might actually be going hungry. She drove straight to the store and bought groceries for Jeremiah’s family, but the episode stayed with her. Each night at the café, she tossed away leftover food without a thought. The idea that her players were going hungry cast her work at Ashton’s in a new light.

“You’re worrying if you’re going to have enough people coming in to buy three-dollar lattes when just down the road there are people who can’t afford to eat,” she said.

The incident settled Luma’s mind on the question of Ashton’s. It was time for her to admit her failure and to walk away. She closed the café and filed for personal bankruptcy. But while the failure of Ashton’s was a blow to Luma’s ego, it also represented an opportunity to focus her life on things that she felt were more meaningful. She wanted to start a business that could employ women like Beatrice, providing them a living wage without requiring them to commute halfway across Atlanta by bus or train. With little capital, Luma didn’t have many options. But she had an idea. She envisioned a simple cleaning business for homes and offices that would employ refugee mothers. She could drum up the clients through her local contacts, and work side by side with her players’ mothers, who could work in the daytime while their children were at school and get home to their families in the evenings.

But mostly, Luma wanted to coach the Fugees. She let her girls’ team know that she wouldn’t be coaching them anymore. She was going to focus all of her energy on her new program and on trying to better the lives of the newcomers whose struggles she felt she understood. But doing so meant taking on far more responsibility than running a café. Luma felt she was ready for the challenge.

“When I got to know the families and their struggles, I knew I couldn’t fail,” she said. “I couldn’t quit when things didn’t go right. I was on the hook to succeed.”

INDEED, WITH LITTLE idea of how it would all turn out and no inkling of the coming political storm around refugee resettlement in Clarkston, Luma was directing her life wholeheartedly toward the refugee community there. In the process, she slowly began to see the outlines of a larger purpose to her life in America, and she felt the warmth of a new family forming around her.

“I thought I would coach twice a week and on weekends—like coaching other kids,” Luma said. “It’s forty or sixty hours a week—coaching, finding jobs, taking people to the hospital. You start off on your own, and you suddenly have a family of a hundred and twenty.”

The family would continue to grow, because whether Clarkston was ready or not, the refugees kept coming.