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Chapter 6
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Outcasts United, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Refugees, Discrimination, and Resilience
Community and Teamwork vs. Division
Leadership and Respect
Discipline, Dedication, and Success
Summary
Analysis
In early 2006, problems develop with the Clarkston Community Center. The board feels that the refugees don’t help enough with the upkeep of the center. They also want the YMCA to pay more for the use of the field, and after some refugee teenagers get in a fight near the field, the board wants the Y to hire guards. The Y refuses, and Luma receives a call from the YMCA saying that the Community Center will no longer allow the Fugees to practice there.
Being kicked off of the field at the Clarkston Community Center begins a saga of trying to find a new field that will serve as a home base for the Fugees. It is representative of the community’s resistance to the refugees on a larger scale and symbolizes the idea that even in a place that represents their new home, the refugees can still feel displaced.
Themes
Luma finds an unused field a few miles away and borrows a bus from the Y to shuttle her players back and forth as a short-term solution. After the summer, the Y helps Luma find a new field behind Indian Creek Elementary School. When Luma visits the field for the first time, she is stunned. It is a “rutted, gravelly field” covered in broken glass, and it has no soccer goals.
The disorder and ragged nature of the field further demonstrates the lack of support that the town has for the refugees, which Luma elaborates on through the rest of the chapter. It appears to her, and to St. John, that they don’t care enough to fight the Community Center or to figure out a better situation.
Themes
Luma tries to put the best face on a bad situation: it is a convenient and free field, and the elementary school has classrooms where she could run her tutoring program. But the field’s condition makes her angry, as she knows that “if a soccer team of a well-to-do suburban kids” were assigned to play on the field, their parents would immediately protest. The parents of the Fugees, however, are seen as powerless.
Luma realizes she needs help, and hires a woman named Tracy Ediger, who had moved to Georgia to work with the refugees. Like Luma, she feels more at home working with the refugees than she does outside of the refugee community. While teaching English to the Somali Bantu refugees, she meets Paula Balegamire (Grace’s mother) and gets connected to Luma. She agrees to serve as team manager for the Fugees for a year, volunteering her time outside of having a part-time job in Atlanta to do everything from driving the YMCA’s bus to tutoring.
Tracy, like Luma, works hard to make sure that the boys can succeed both on and off the field. She dedicates her time and resources to making sure that the Fugees program has the support it needs to flourish, whether this means tutoring or helping them get to soccer practice on time. Tracy quickly becomes a part of the Fugees’ growing community of support.
Themes
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