Outcasts United Quotes

In fact, things with the Fugees were more fragile than I could have realized that day. The team had no home field. The players’ private lives were an intense daily struggle to stay afloat. They and their families had fled violence and chaos and found themselves in a place with a completely different set of values and customs.

She was just a woman who wanted, in her own way, to make the world a better place. She had vowed to come through for her players and their families or to come apart trying.

Brown accepted that her players might not like her at first. But she was willing to wait out the hostility in the hope that her players would eventually buy in.

The incident robbed Beatrice of the hope her family would be safe in her new home. She became obsessed with her boys’ safety. In Liberia, a neighbor would always look after her kids if she needed to leave them to run an errand or visit a friend. But Beatrice didn’t know anyone in Clarkston.

In 2001, Lee Swaney—a longtime city council member who called himself a champion of “old Clarkston,” that is, Clarkston before the refugees—ran for mayor.

Soon Luma was running herself sweaty, pleasantly lost in a game with strangers. “It reminded me what I missed about my community at home,” she said. “And at the time I felt like such an outsider.”

Given the love for soccer in the refugee community, Luma wondered if the game and her team could attract some of these kids to after-school tutoring that might give them a better chance to succeed. She resolved to get help from volunteers and educators for tutoring before practices, and to require her players to attend or lose their spots on her team.

With her Arabic and French, Luma was able to translate documents and answer some of their questions. She made appointments with doctors and social workers. Luma gave her cell phone number to her players and their families, and soon they were calling with requests for help.

“She said we’re all foreigners, and this is a team where everybody unites,” recalled Yousph Woldeyesus, an Ethiopian player. “And she told us she was going to kick us off the team if we didn’t.”

The next season, Darlington and Peshawa worked together to score, and their team went undefeated.

Luma also felt that if a soccer team of well-to-do sub urban kids was assigned to play on a field of sand and broken glass, their parents would call the team’s sponsors or the league—someone—to protest. The parents of the Fugees’ players were seen as powerless, she believed, so no one thought much about making the team play on such a bad field.

He would leave tutoring early or skip it altogether, acts that undermined Luma’s authority before the rest of the team. Players soon started to follow Prince’s lead and challenge her.

With no siblings in the United States, and a guardian who was hardly ever home, Kanue began to view the team as his family. “The Fugees—it’s really important to me,” he said. “When I play on that team, I’m with my brothers.”

“I told her I appreciate her,” Kanue said later. “I told her thanks, and that we were going to do everything to follow the rules and give her the respect she deserves.”

Luma dropped her head in relief. Her players, some of them still strangers to each other, were high-fiving and shouting joyfully at the sky as they ran toward her on the bench. They seemed as surprised as she did. Luma raised her head, pulled her shoulders back, and smiled for the first time in two weeks.

Swaney’s proposal changed the energy in the room. The council’s questions became gentler. They talked among themselves and agreed that six months sounded like a reasonable amount of time for a trial period.

There was a motion, and a second.

The motion passed unanimously. Luma nodded in thanks and stifled a smile. The Fugees, for now at least, had a home.

“What makes a gang different from the Fugees?” Luma asked.
“They fight.”
“They shoot each other.”
“Once you’re part of a gang, you can’t get away.”

It was a small, silly moment, but it also showed that boys from thirteen different countries and a wide array of ethnicities and religions and who spoke different languages were creating their own inside jokes.

“For a while I expected you to be like Jeremiah,” she told him. “Actually, you’re a better athlete—but you don’t have the discipline or the respect to play. You don’t respect me, and you don’t respect your team.”

Robin calmed down at school and became outgoing with his teammates. Idwar, still quiet and shy, became a confident young man on the field. Soccer, Shamsoun said, kept the boys sane.

“It kept our minds from thinking about what happened,” he said. “We made friends—kids from different cultures. It broadened our minds, and we weren’t the only ones going through hard times. That’s why the team is so close. It became our family.”

The boys formed a circle at midfield, draped their arms around each other, and bowed their heads. Both Grace and Eldin felt more comfort able praying the way they’d been taught—in their native languages. No one objected as Grace prayed aloud in Swahili and Eldin in Bosnian, first for the health and safety of their teammates, and then, if God saw fit, for a victory.

Pull back farther, and you got a sense of where Clarkston sat in America—tucked in a green corner of the country beneath the gray ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Pull back again, and the blue oceans came into view, then other continents and countries—Congo, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq—all looking deceptively calm. Pull back farther still and the curved horizons of the planet revealed themselves—a beautiful ball of green, white, blue, slate, and brown. Someday, somewhere down there, the Fugees would find a home.

“If people can look at her and see that, that she’s human, not a saint or a superhero, and that she doesn’t—can’t—do everything or effect miracles, then maybe they can say to themselves, ‘I need to look around myself and see my neighborhood, and what is going on here and five streets over, and what I can do in terms of investing myself and my time, to be present for the people around me, and to do something positive for change in my community.’

“No one person can do everything,” Tracy said. “But we can all do something.”