Outcasts United: Part One

Hassan doted on his eldest child.

The al-Muflehs sent Luma to the American Community School (ACS) in Amman, a school for the children of American expatriates, mostly diplomats and businessmen, and elite Jordanians, including the children of King Hussein and Queen Noor.

The al-Muflehs sent Luma to the American Community School (ACS) in Amman, a school for the children of American expatriates, mostly diplomats and businessmen, and elite Jordanians, including the children of King Hussein and Queen Noor.

Friends from Smith remember Luma as outgoing and involved, active in intramural soccer and in social events sponsored by the college’s house system.

Luma didn’t yet have a permit to work legally in the United States, so she found herself looking for the sorts of jobs available to illegal immigrants, settling on a position washing dishes and cleaning toilets at a local restaurant called the Mountaineer.

Taylor, a Liberian, had gone to college in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and, after being convicted in an embezzling scheme, escaped an American jail through a window, using a hacksaw and a rope of knotted bedsheets.

Taylor’s force grew quickly, in no small part augmented by boys whom he armed and drugged into a killing frenzy.

More than one hundred thousand Krahn refugees flooded into neighboring Ivory Coast, even as Doe’s Krahn soldiers committed atrocities of their own.

He went into exile in Nigeria, was indicted for war crimes by the United Nations, and was eventually captured in an SUV stashed with cash and heroin on the Nigeria-Cameroon border.

The walls were dingy and bare.

A pastoral suburb of around 7,200 amid a city of some five million people, Clarkston is still its own town.

Clarkston was originally settled by yeoman farmers and railroad workers in the years after the Civil War.

It was a typical small southern town, conservative and white.

That began to change in the 1970s, when the Atlanta airport expanded to become the Southeast’s first international hub and, eventually, one of the world’s busiest airports.

Landlords filled the apartment complexes through government housing programs and cut back on upkeep, allowing the complexes to fall into disrepair.

So the agencies, encouraged by the success of that early round of resettlement, brought in other refugees—survivors of the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and oppressed minorities from the former Soviet Union.

The 2000 census revealed that one-third of Clarkston’s population was foreign-born, though almost everyone suspected the number was higher because census estimates did not account for large numbers of refugees and immigrants living together.

Women walked down the street in hijabs and even in full burkas, or jalabib.

A mosque opened up on Indian Creek Drive, just across the street from the elementary and high schools, and began to draw hundreds of worshipers.

As newcomers arrived, many older white residents simply left, and the demographic change was reflected in nearly all of Clarkston’s institutions.

Attendance at the old Clarkston Baptist Church dwindled from around seven hundred to fewer than a hundred.

Councilwoman Karen Feltz remembers that when she moved to Clarkston from the nearby Atlanta neighborhood of Five Points—a community with a vibrant nightlife, and one where neighbors say hello and look after each other—she was struck by the strange quiet of her neighbors.

“A lot of our community members felt harassed, discriminated against,” said Salahadin Wazir, the imam of the Clarkston mosque.

Most recently, when the Somali civil war began in 1991, the warring factions forced the Somali Bantu off their land in the fertile Juba River valley.

Women walked the streets in chadors and hijabs, while others wore colorful African robes and headdresses.

Luma stocked up on groceries—pita bread, hummus, and halloumi, a salty sheep’s and goat’s milk cheese that was one of her favorites—then went home to make herself a meal like her grandmother might have made.

The sight of boys of so many ethnicities in one place began to open Luma’s eyes to what was happening in Clarkston, just down the road from her own home.

The boys were wary.

The loneliness of being uprooted was something Luma understood.

She also learned that pickup soccer in the town’s parking lots was the only kind of soccer the refugee kids could afford; even the modest fees required to play soccer at the local public schools were too high for most of the boys’ families.

When Hansen mentioned his delight at seeing a group of refugee children take the field to play soccer, he was rebuked by a couple of Clarkston residents who served on the center’s board and the city council.

That first season, the Fugees played in a recreational, or rec, league, an informal division teams played in before they could enter competition in the “select” grouping.

That first season, the Fugees played in a recreational, or rec, league, an informal division teams played in before they could enter competition in the “select” grouping.

In scrimmages, boys would always pass to their own kind.

“And kids from northern Africa would look down on kids from other parts of Africa. There was a lot of underlying racism and a lot of baggage they brought with them.”

The family unloaded the car in a daze and followed the caseworker through a doorway into a stark ground-floor apartment with mattresses on the floor.

In the ensuing civil war, which lasted until 2003, some three hundred thousand died, and countless fled into the mountains or into refugee camps in Tanzania and Mozambique.

She looked out for cliques, especially among players who wanted to stick with their own kind.

It was a rutted, gravelly field of gray Georgia chalk with a few tufts of grass and tall weeds.

Through Paula, Tracy met Luma, who mentioned that she was looking for a coordinator for her soccer program, someone who could handle team logistics like travel and scheduling and be in charge of tutoring.