The June 23 issue of Sports Illustrated has an amazing human-interest story by Gary Smith, “Alive and Kicking,” which chronicles an Atlanta-based youth soccer team composed of children who are refugees from war zones in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The team has been organized and kept afloat by Luma Mufleh, an immigrant born to privilege in Jordan.
Smith does an excellent job of evoking the roughness of the children’s lives in refuge, highlighting traumatic pasts and still-evolving struggles to get by. Rough neighborhoods, racism and single working mothers are the norm for the team’s members. Mufleh begins to anchor the group after a chance encounter with some boys playing makeshift soccer outside a mosque. Adrift herself and estranged from her family, she turns her attachment to the kids into a larger mission to enable them to thrive.
As Smith writes:
Which only turned the screws tighter as her careers floundered and she found herself, at 29, eating dinner on the floor with a poor Afghan family in Clarkston. Yes, she’d collapsed the wall between herself and poverty at last, but all the trouble and complexities behind that wall were crawling into her lap, demanding choices from her, decisions that could turn her into something so much more than a coach … yet so much less than the doctor or lawyer or tycoon her father expected.
Could she stand back and watch Rooh, struggling with English, fall perilously behind in school? No. She became his tutor. Could she tutor him without tutoring his brother Noor, or all the other failing Fugees? No. She paid someone else to do her laundry, put her personal life on ice and scurried each evening from one apartment to the next.
“Coach!” the mothers called to her when she’d finished helping their children with homework. The women had no clue how to fill out forms for food stamps or green cards, how to compel the landlord to fix the oven or stop the mildew spreading across their walls. She became their advocate.
None of the players, back in their homelands, had had the luxury of worrying about grammar or manners, about deodorant or toothpaste. But without those things here, she knew, they’d be taunted or shunned. She became their grammar cop, their Miss Manners, their hygienist.
They didn’t have soccer moms. The Fugees showed up late for practice because they had no rides, woke up late for school because their parents worked night shifts, or came home to empty apartments because it took their mothers an hour and a half to travel 17 miles from work by train and bus. She became their chauffeur.
How many Fugees can fit in a yellow VW Beetle? Don’t ask. She was about to drop off the last urchin one day after practice when he told her that his belly hurt from hunger. Fix a sandwich when you get home, she suggested. He shook his head. “This is the time of the month when our food runs out,” he said. She began taking boys to Taco Bell—two tacos and a cup of ice water for $1.98—and to the store for a week’s supply of groceries. She became their food bank.
She tried to help their mothers figure out a budget so they’d make it to the end of the month, but no math could stretch $5.75 an hour that far. She closed her café, started a company named Fresh Start and offered the mothers 10 bucks an hour to clean homes and offices. She became their employer.
By highlighting Mufleh’s dedication, while acknowledging its limitations, the story exerts a welcome, subtle shaming upon the rest of us, those who could do more, and for whatever reason, don’t. How is Mufleh able to give so much of herself?
Another undercurrent that stood out to me was the sense of responsibility that will increasingly apply to Americans as children born in countries we’ve placed in carnage evoked will grow up damaged and in need. In the past, the majority of the breaking was done by others. Today, many of the fractures bear our own fingerprints, making the question of charity all the more relevant.