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.