Luma Mufleh has spent the past few weeks crisscrossing the country to raise $5 million so she can build a new school and world class soccer facility for children of war-ravaged countries who've been resettled a few miles northeast of Atlanta.
"My dream is to help these children, without compromise, and I will see it done," said Mufleh, who so far has raised about $250,000.
Mufleh -- "Coach Luma" to the 80 or so kids from about 30 nations in the soccer club known as the Fugees, short for refugees -- started the sports club in Clarkston in 2006 and has since been featured nationally on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" and in The New York Times.
It all started in 2004 when Mufleh was driving through DeKalb County and saw a dozen or so barefoot boys playing with a ragged ball in a vacant parking lot, with little piles of stones for soccer goal posts.
It reminded Mufleh, a graduate of Smith College, of how she and her friends used to play in her native Jordan. She wanted to help them.
The next day she went back and brought them a brand new soccer ball and learned they they were refugee children resettled by the U.S. government from a variety of nations, including Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Congo.
Mufleh, who was working as soccer coach in the metro area, eventually formed the kids into a team and founded the charity Fugees Family Inc., whose goal is to help the refugee children and their families.
In the early years, the team made national news because Clarkston's then mayor, Lee Swaney, proposed banning soccer in a town park. Many residents at the time felt their town was tainted as racist by that action, but the group has since been embraced by locals.
"We all know the good work that Miss Mufleh has been doing for the refugee children in this community and we're all behind her," said Clarkston Mayor Emanuel Ransom. "We all know that her heart is about helping those children."
But that's not enough, she said.
"They need better schools than what they have locally," Mufleh said. "The [public] schools don't have enough people or time to devote the attention that the kids need. They could be dropped into a class and expected to do Shakespeare or algebra when they've received little or no school in their home countries."
Her charity has already bought about 19 acres just outside of Clarkston and she has a goal to raise enough money to start building a private school for 280 refugee boys and girls from grades 6 to 12 by the end of 2012.
"We want to develop a program that will be a national model," she said, "able to provide intensive individual work with each kid to quickly bring them up to grade level. Too many of them can fall through the cracks at public schools."
