A town, and team, transformed: immigrants have always inspired strong reactions, both positive and negative. A look at how a boys soccer team made up of refugees and a small town in Georgia are learning to live with each other.

BACKGROUND

Although the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, each new immigrant group has faced discrimination when it first arrived. Today, young refugees from various countries find themselves in Clarkston, Ga., where in spite of some antipathy toward newcomers, their skills on the soccer field are helping them fit in and stand out.

CRITICAL THINKING

* Address a key theme in the story: the collision of cultures. Ask students to discuss how and why many people find it difficult to accept strangers in their midst. Is the negative reaction just a part of human nature? A defensive instinct?

* The article does not address the question of whether or not local residents were asked about the refugee resettlement program. Should refugee agencies try to obtain the consent of local people or gauge public opinion on the subject?

WRITING PROMPT/DISCUSSION

* Tell students to write their own rules for a soccer team made up of refugees from different countries. Their rules should focus on strategies a coach might use to help teens from very different cultures work together as a team.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

* Do you agree with the article's implication that adversity helps make people (like the Fugees) more resilient?

* Does your school have immigrant students? If so, how have other students responded to them?

FAST FACT

* In 2005, California, Florida, and Minnesota were the destinations of 35 percent of refugees coming to the U.S.

* In 2006, the United Nations said there were 24 million "internally displaced" people who were forced to flee their homes but remain in their country. Afghanistan and Lebanon are examples of two such countries.

WEB WATCH

www.refugees.org/article .aspx?id=1082

The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants outlines the step-by-step process refugees must go through before and after they arrive in the U.S.

Until refugees began arriving about 20 years ago, Mayor Lee Swaney likes to say, Clarkston, Georgia, "was just a sleepy little town by the railroad tracks." Since then, this town of 7,100 people east of Atlanta has become one of the most diverse communities in America.

Clarkston High School now has students from more than 50 countries. The local mosque draws more than 800 to Friday prayers. There are congregations of Vietnamese, Sudanese, and Liberian Christians, as well as a Hindu temple. At the shopping center, American stores have been replaced by Vietnamese and Ethiopian restaurants.

The transformation began in the late 1980s, when refugee resettlement agencies decided Clarkston was a perfect place for refugees to America to begin new lives. The town had plenty of inexpensive apartments and access to jobs in nearby, and booming, Atlanta.

Today, as many as half of Clarkston's residents are refugees from war-tom countries around the world. As the town changed, many longtime residents left, and tensions grew between the old-timers who stayed and the refugees. At a town meeting in 2003 meant to foster understanding between the two groups, the first question was, "What can we do to keep the refugees from coming to Clarkston?"

Caught in the middle is a boys soccer program called the Fugees--short for refugees (though most assume the name refers to the hip-hop group). To many longtime Clarkston residents, soccer is a sign of unwanted change, as unfamiliar as the headscarves worn by the Muslim women in town.

NO GRAY AREAS'

The Fugees, ages 9 to 17, are all refugees from some of the most troubled corners of the world--Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Congo, Gambia, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia, and Sudan. Their presence seems to bring out the best in some people, and the worst in others.

"There are no gray areas with the Fugees," says the team's coach, Luma Mufleh, 31, a Jordanian immigrant awaiting her green card.

"They trigger people's reactions on class, on race. They speak with accents and don't seem American. A lot of people get shaken up by that."

About 1 million refugees have been admitted to the United States since 1993 (see box, p. 15), and each Fugees player's journey offers a small window into the refugee experience. Consider the story of Jeremiah Ziaty, 11, a leader of the 13-and-under Fugees team.

One night in 1997, in the midst of Liberia's 14-year civil war, rebels showed up at the Ziatys' house in Monrovia. Jeremiah's father worked in a government payroll office, and the rebels thought he had money. When they learned he did not, they killed him in the family's living room.

Beatrice Ziaty, Jeremiah's mother, grabbed her sons and fled out the back door. The Ziatys trekked through the bush for a week until they reached a refugee camp in the Ivory Coast. There, they lived in a mud hut and scavenged for food. After five years in the camp, Ziaty learned her family had been accepted for resettlement in the United States.

The Ziatys' resettlement in 2003 followed a familiar script. The family was lent $3,016 for one-way airline tickets to Atlanta, which they repaid in three years. A woman from the resettlement agency took them to an apartment in Clarkston.

Other members of the Fugees have equally harrowing stories. Qendrim Bushi's Muslim family fled Kosovo when Serbian soldiers torched his father's grocery store and threatened to kill the entire family. One Liberian player was forced by soldiers to shoot his best friend. One had been a child soldier. Another fled the Taliban. One was an Iraqi Kurd who fled Saddam Hussein. One player's father remains a political prisoner in the Congo.

The Fugees all know trauma, and that is their bond. "In order to get a group to work together, to be effective together, you have to find what is common," Mufleh says. "The refugee experience is pretty powerful."

Mufleh, who came to the U.S. to attend college, started the Fugees soccer program in 2004 after she learned of the growing refugee community in Clarkston. The Y.M.C.A. offered uniforms and equipment.

Coach Mufleh requires hard work and commitment from her players--qualities she hopes will help them succeed in their new country. Since many of them have learned the game on street comers or in refugee camps, they don't know the basics of organized soccer; there are no throw-ins or corner kicks in the street game they were playing. But Mufleh is determined to teach them--and to get them to win.

Like refugees in general, the Fugees have had a knack for inspiring strong reactions, both positive and negative. After one game, a parent from the opposing team ran after Mufleh.

"We've heard about your team," the man said. "We want to know what we can do to help."

The rival team donated cleats, balls, and jerseys.

But the Fugees have faced hostility on the soccer field too. At one game, rival players and even some parents shouted racial epithets at some of the African players on the Fugees. Opponents sometimes mocked the Fugees when they spoke to each other in Swahili, or when Mufleh shouted instructions in Arabic.

Mufleh tells her players to ignore these slights. She is just as fatalistic about bad calls. Bad calls, Mufleh tells her players, are part of the game. You have to accept them, and move on.

The Fugees are perhaps better equipped to accept this advice than most. Their lives, after all, have been defined by bad calls. On the field, they seem to have a higher threshold for anger than the American players, who often respond to borderline calls as if they are catastrophic injustices.

GLARING DIFFERENCES AT GAMES

This season has had its share of challenges and disappointments. The team tied its first game and lost its second. But on a sweltering afternoon in September, things finally came together for the boys. They were playing against the Triumph, a team from a nearby town called Tucker.

Even before the game, there was a glaring difference between the Fugees and their competition. The Triumph brought about 40 parents, siblings, and friends, who spread out with folding chairs and picnic blankets. Though this was technically a home game, there was no one on the Fugees' side.

But they played beautifully: firing headers, bicycle kicks, and a gorgeous arcing shot from 30 yards out. Even the parents of the Triumph gasped and clapped in appreciation. The Fugees won, 5-1.

"What makes us work as a team is we all want to win bad--we want to be the best team around," says Qendrim Bushi, the player from Kosovo. "It's like they're all from my own country," he says of his teammates. "They're my brothers."

By early November the regular season was done; the Fugees, after their ups and downs, finished third in their division. In the post-season battle for the Tornado Cup championship, the Fugees battled valiantly, but in the end, came up one goal short. The Fugees were crushed.

BRIGHT FUTURE

In January, a story about the Fugees (from which this article is adapted) appeared in The New York Times. Mufleh received more than 4,000 e-mails, with many offering to donate money, equipment, and uniforms.

Despite the tensions in Clarkston between the refugees and the old-timers, Mayor Swaney has embraced the Fugees. "I am delighted to see the recognition that Coach Mufleh and her team are receiving for their impressive success story," he wrote in a statement. "The Fugees represent the best of what the human spirit can accomplish."

The Times article also struck a chord in Hollywood. Several producers thought the story of the Fugees had big-screen potential, and a bidding war for the movie rights followed. In the end, Universal Studios paid $3 million for the rights. Mufleh says most of her portion of the fee will go into a foundation she has set up for the players.

Finally, the Fugees' future is looking bright.

WHO IS A REFUGEE?

Refugees are people who cannot return to their home countries for fear of harm or persecution. There are more than 12 million worldwide, according to one estimate.

Only a small fraction ever get resettled in new countries. In 2005, fewer than 81,000 refugees were accepted by other nations for resettlement, according to the United Nations, with the U.S. taking 53,000, the most by far.

Refugees are just a small part of the larger picture of legal (as opposed to illegal) immigration to the U.S. Of the 11.2 million immigrants who were admitted to the U.S. legally between 1993 and 2005, about 1.1 million were refugees.

THE FUGEES

The 13-and-under Fugees team with Coach Mufleh (top left) and the team's manager, Tracy Ediger (top right). There are also two older teams: 15-and-unders and 17-and-unders.

COACH LUMA MUFLEH

A Jordanian Immigrant waiting for her green card, she started the Fugees soccer program in 2004.

QENDRIM BUSHI

His Muslim family fled Kosovo when Serbian soldiers torched his father's grocery store and threatened to kill them.

SANTINO JERKE

From Sudan, he recently arrived after three years as a refugee in Egypt.

SHAHIR ANWAR 

An Afghan whose family fled the Taliban

MOHAMMED MOHAMMED

An Iraqi Kurd whose family fled Saddam Hussein for Turkey five years ago, he speaks just a few words of English.

JEREMIAH ZIATY

His family fled Liberia when his father was killed in their home during the civil war.

Warren St. John writes for the Style section of The New York Times.

REFUGEES
IN THE U.S.

TOP 5 COUNTRIES
OF ORIGIN (2005)

SOMALIA   10,405
LAOS       8,517
CUBA       6,356
RUSSIA     5,982
LIBERIA    4,289

SOURCE: MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE

Note: Table made from bar graph.