DEL.ICIO.USWoman’s love of soccer gives big lift to refugees
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, April 26, 2009
A sky-blue bus pulled up at the Carter Center and 14 boys piled out, a rainbow of adolescence wearing dark pants, gold sneakers and matching red warm-up jackets.
“OK, everyone needs a tie,” a young woman instructed, knotting cravats around her own neck and then looping them over the heads of her charges.
Kent D. Johnson/kdjohnson@ajc.com
Abdullahi Jama, a member of the Fugees youth soccer team, practices with his teammates at Milam Park in Clarkston.
Everyone had to look sharp. These were the Fugees, and this was their big night.
Several hundred people had gathered to hear author Warren St. John discuss his new book, “Outcasts United,” about the refugee soccer teams in Clarkston that go by the name Fugees. His 2007 narrative in The New York Times helped transformed an obscure after-school program into a feel-good story with global appeal.
While his portrayal of tensions between the refugees and some long-time residents bruised feelings, much of the resentment seems to have blown over.
“The Fugees have put us on the map,” said Clarkston Councilman Emanuel Ransom, who attended with two other council members and the police chief.
The Fugees themselves sat in the front rows of the crowded auditorium. Some of them figured in the book and were even pictured on the cover. Others were no longer with the program; they had moved away, gone to college, enrolled in private schools. Life, like soccer, goes on.
The boys tried not to fidget as their chronicler took the podium, followed by their co-founder, coach and sometime tie-knotter.
“This is not something I’m very comfortable with,” Luma Mufleh began. “I’d rather be at practice with the kids.”
For Coach Luma, as she calls herself, the evening was the latest chapter in an unlikely journey that began in the Middle East 34 years ago.
Born to a well-off family in Jordan, she grew up playing soccer and carried that love to the States, where she attended Smith College. After graduation, she gravitated to Atlanta, where she opened a café in Decatur and volunteered to coach at the local Y.
One day, driving back from an international food market in Clarkston, she took a wrong turn into an apartment complex and saw a group of barefoot boys playing soccer on the pavement.
“It didn’t look like the rest of Atlanta,” she said. “It didn’t look like the rest of the United States.”
The U.S. government had designated Clarkston a refugee resettlement community, turning a quiet Southern suburb into a beehive of nationalities and complications. The newcomers came with heavy baggage of war and deprivation. Mufleh decided she could help by organizing a boys’ soccer team.
St. John got wind of the program in 2006 and embedded himself during the fall season. Every good story needs conflict, and he found his in Mufleh’s attempt to persuade a reluctant mayor to let her team practice in a city park.
His ambivalence still bewilders her. “I didn’t understand why it was so hard for us to find a place to play. It’s just a game. It shouldn’t be threatening.”
When St. John’s story ran on the front page of the Sunday Times, Mufleh was inundated. She received 200 e-mails an hour and boxes of mail addressed to “Coach Luma, Clarkston, Ga.”
“I was shocked,” she said. “I hid for two days.”
People sent money, jerseys, shoes. Nike agreed to outfit the Fugees at a cost of more than $60,000 a year. One woman bought the bus that brought the group to the Carter Center. Dozens of media outlets called. Mufleh consented to pieces with NPR and ESPN but turned away most of the others — even “The Daily Show.”
“I was like: ‘Jon Stewart, all right!’” she said. “Then I thought, ‘Oh, no, they’ll massacre us or massacre the mayor. We have to live here. We don’t want to cause any more problems.’”
The story did cause PR problems for Clarkston. Scores of readers called city hall to accuse the locals of prejudice. Mayor Lee Swaney felt especially wounded. He’s vowed not to read St. John’s book.
“He came down here and mistook our goodness for weakness,” Swaney said recently. “I hope he doesn’t ever come to Clarkston again.”
Mufleh bought a house in Clarkston, near the disputed field where the Fugees now practice with the City Council’s permission. Coincidentally, it’s also near the mayor’s residence. She said they haven’t spoken in more than two years.
Mufleh is aware that some people resent all the attention heaped on the Fugees. “I’ve heard about people telling the boys, ‘Oh, your coach is just using you. She’s going to make all this money off you.’”
The publicity did bring a sharp upturn in donations. In the past two years, Fugees Family, the nonprofit behind the teams, has increased its annual budget sixfold, to about $300,000. Mufleh makes $40,000 and heads an organization that now includes three other employees, seven AmeriCorps volunteers, and 86 boys ages 10 to 18 who play almost year-round, attend camps and receive after-school tutoring.
While United Pictures did buy movie rights to the book in a deal that eventually could net $3 million, the Fugees have not received anything yet. They stand to make $500,000 if and when a film begins production.
“None of this has changed our reality,” Mufleh said. “We live in low-income neighborhoods. We have kids that barely read. We have gang violence. We have parents losing their jobs every week. A spot on the ‘Today’ show doesn’t change the world.”
Her long-term goal is to build a private school, the Fugees Academy. A fledgling version with 12 full-time students is renting space in the Friends School of Atlanta.
One of the pupils, Josiah Saydee, a 15-year-old from Liberia, was summoned to the Carter Center stage Wednesday to do an impression of his coach’s spirited half-time speeches. Afterwards, signing books in the lobby with his teammates, he explained what it means to be part of the program.
“The Fugees are like my family,” he said in a spicy African accent. “This is more than a game to us.”
Coach Luma couldn’t have said it any better.
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