“I’ll treat him like he’s my own kid,” Luma told her. “He’s going to be my responsibility.”
Beatrice agreed to give the situation a try. Jeremiah climbed into Luma’s Volkswagen and sat among the soccer balls and bright orange plastic cones strewn about—she used the car as a mobile equipment locker—and together they were off to practice. One Shoe had no intention of letting his mother down.
IN THOSE EARLY practices, Luma made a point not to ask her players about their pasts. The soccer field, she felt, should be a place where they could leave all that behind. But occasionally, as the kids became more comfortable with her, they would reveal specifics about their experiences in ways that underscored the lingering effects of those traumas. Luma learned that Jeremiah, for example, had been at home the night that his father was killed. Once, in an early practice, Luma expressed frustration that a young Liberian player seemed to suddenly zone out during play. Another Liberian who knew the boy told her she didn’t understand: the boy had been forced by soldiers to shoot a close friend. Luma wasn’t a social worker, and she had no background in dealing with profound psychological trauma. In such moments, she felt perilously in over her head.
“How do you react when someone tells you he saw his father get killed?” she said. “I didn’t know.”
Luma picked up on another problem facing her young players. Many had come from societies that had been fractured by war, and as a consequence they never had access to any kind of formal education. It wasn’t uncommon for some refugee children to be both illiterate in their native languages and innumerate—they had never learned the simplest math skills. Without this basic education in their own languages, they were playing catch-up in schools where classes were taught in a new language many of the boys could barely understand, if at all. While the public school system around Clarkston offered English-as-a-second-language programs, the schools were overwhelmed with newcomers. To move students through the system, many refugees were placed in standard classes that, while appropriate for their ages, did not take into account their lack of schooling or their deficiencies in English. The clock was ticking on these young students; if they didn’t get help and find a way to succeed in school, they would fail out or simply get too old for high school, at which point they would be on their own. Given the enthusiasm for soccer in the refugee community, Luma wondered if perhaps the game and her team could be an enticement for after-school tutoring that might give young refugees 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 else lose their spots on her team.
Somewhere along the way, the team got a name: the Fugees. Luma was unsure of who exactly came up with the name, which many opposing teams assumed was a reference to the hip-hop band. But in fact it was simply short for “refugees.” The name stuck, and over time began to take on its own meaning among the kids in Clarkston, one separate from its etymology. In Clarkston, the Fugees meant soccer.
That first season, the Fugees played in a recreational, or “rec,” league, an informal division teams were required to play in before they could be admitted to more formal competition in the “select” grouping. There wasn’t much of an equipment budget, so Luma relied on donations, which didn’t always work out. A batch of jerseys given to the Fugees turned out to be absurdly large, like nightshirts. Someone donated a box of old cleats, which Luma distributed to her players. When one of those players went to kick the ball, the sole of his shoe went flying into the air to hysterical laughter from his teammates; the shoes were so old that the glue holding them together had rotted. Luma stoically refused to acknowledge the equipment problems, at least to her players. She didn’t want them to get discouraged by what they didn’t have. She even made a point of wearing the same clothes to practices and games—soccer shorts, a ratty green T-shirt, and her dingy Smith baseball cap—because she noticed her players almost always wore the same clothes themselves.
Luma began the work of trying to make a competitive team out of her young recruits. She had to teach them the basics of organized play—how to execute throw-ins, how to stay onside. But soon enough, a far bigger challenge began to reveal itself. Luma noticed that when she would tell the boys to divide into groups for drills, they would instinctively divide themselves according to their ethnic backgrounds or common languages. In scrimmages, boys would overlook open teammates to pass to their own kind. And each group, she learned, had its own prejudices toward others.
“The Afghan and Iraqi kids would look down at the African kids,” Luma said. “And kids from northern Africa would look down at kids from other parts of Africa. There was a lot of underlying racism and a lot of baggage they brought with them.”
Somehow, Luma would have to find a way to get kids from so many cultures and backgrounds to play as a unit.
“It was about trying to figure out what they have in common,” she said.
WHILE LUMA WAS trying to find a way to get the kids to play together, she was also getting to know their parents, mostly single mothers. She found they needed help—in understanding immigration documents, bills, school registration, and the like. With her Arabic and French, she was able to translate documents and find help through the network of people she was getting to know in the resettlement community. She arranged appointments with doctors and social workers. Luma gave her cell phone number out to her players and their families, and soon they were calling with requests for help negotiating their new lives. Teachers learned to call Luma during crises when her players’ parents couldn’t be found or were at work. All the while, Luma began to marvel at the impact of even the simplest of gestures on her part. The families were extraordinarily grateful, which they showed by offering Luma tea and inviting her to dinners. Luma found herself both appreciated and needed, and couldn’t help but notice how much more fulfilling this kind of work was than running Ashton’s. In fact, Ashton’s was losing money—and fast. Luma faced the possibility of having to close and even of declaring bankruptcy. The stress, she said, was overwhelming. She didn’t want to disappoint her investors, and she had wanted more than anything to prove to her parents back home that she was capable of succeeding on her own.
“I had never failed like that before,” she said. “There was a lot of shame. It was my friends who had invested in the business. Filing for bankruptcy at the age of twenty-eight was not something I had aspired to do. I was as low as when I had gotten cut off from my family. Nothing was going right.”
One afternoon Luma was driving Jeremiah home when he let slip that he was hungry. Luma told him he should eat when he got home, but Jeremiah said there wasn’t any food there—that it was, in his words, “that time of the month.” It was a curious phrase for a nine-year-old boy. Luma probed, and Jeremiah explained that at a certain time each month, food stamps ran out. The family had to go hungry until another batch arrived. Luma was floored. She had understood that her players’ families were poor, but she hadn’t realized that they might actually be going hungry. She drove straight to the store and bought groceries for Jeremiah’s family, but the episode stayed with her. Each night at the café, she tossed away leftover food without a thought. The idea that her players were going hungry cast her work at Ashton’s in a new light.
“You’re worrying if you’re going to have enough people coming in to buy three-dollar lattes when just down the road there are people who can’t afford to eat,” she said.
The incident settled Luma’s mind on the question of Ashton’s. It was time for her to admit her failure and to walk away. She closed the café and filed for personal bankruptcy. But while the failure of Ashton’s was a blow to Luma’s ego, it also represented an opportunity to focus her life on things that she felt were more meaningful. She wanted to start a business that could employ women like Beatrice, providing them a living wage without requiring them to commute halfway across Atlanta by bus or train. With little capital, Luma didn’t have many options. But she had
an idea. She envisioned a simple cleaning business for homes and offices that would employ refugee mothers. She could drum up the clients through her local contacts, and work side by side with her players’ mothers, who could work in the daytime while their children were at school and get home to their families in the evenings.
But mostly, Luma wanted to coach the Fugees. She let her girls’ team know that she wouldn’t be coaching them anymore. She was going to focus all of her energy on her new program and on trying to better the lives of the newcomers whose struggles she felt she understood. But doing so meant taking on far more responsibility than running a café. Luma felt she was ready for the challenge.
“When I got to know the families and their struggles, I knew I couldn’t fail,” she said. “I couldn’t quit when things didn’t go right. I was on the hook to succeed.”
INDEED, WITH LITTLE idea of how it would all turn out and no inkling of the coming political storm around refugee resettlement in Clarkston, Luma was directing her life wholeheartedly toward the refugee community there. In the process, she slowly began to see the outlines of a larger purpose to her life in America, and she felt the warmth of a new family forming around her.
“I thought I would coach twice a week and on weekends—like coaching other kids,” Luma said. “It’s forty or sixty hours a week—coaching, finding jobs, taking people to the hospital. You start off on your own, and you suddenly have a family of a hundred and twenty.”
The family would continue to grow, because whether Clarkston was ready or not, the refugees kept coming.
Chapter Six
Paula
Many of the refugees in Clarkston had been displaced by events far removed from their immediate lives—the decision of some despot hundreds of miles away to clear a region of a particular ethnic or political group in order to seize its resources, or the sudden appearance of soldiers in a village, fighting for a remote cause with no concern for collateral damage. For these refugees, the events that sent them running for their lives had a mysterious and unknowable quality, like a life-altering natural disaster. For others, though, there was no mistaking the reasons for their flight, the specific people who had driven them to flee, or even how their seemingly circumscribed personal stories fit into the broader political narratives of their countries and ethnic groups.
Paula Balegamire fell into the latter category. A refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, she had arrived in Clarkston with her six children in 2004 after escaping Africa’s deadliest conflict in modern times: the second civil war in Congo—formerly Zaire—which raged from 1998 to 2002 and claimed an estimated 5.4 million lives. To get to safety in a new country, Paula had been forced to make a terrible choice: to remain near her husband, Joseph, who had been thrown into one of Congo’s most notorious prisons in a political purge, and to live under constant threat of violence or death herself; or to leave her husband behind and take her children to a life in an unknown town in another hemisphere.
The long chain of dominoes that led to that aching choice first began to fall more than a hundred years before, in 1884 in Berlin, and tumbled through the twentieth century until ultimately bursting through the doorway of a small house at 19 rue Lweme in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, in the middle of the night on January 28, 2001.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, Paula’s homeland, occupies territory deep in the heart of Africa that remained mostly beyond the reach of Western powers until the 1870s, when the Welsh-born explorer Henry Morton Stanley became the first Westerner to successfully traverse Central Africa and returned to a hero’s welcome in Europe. Stanley was soon courted by King Leopold II of Belgium, a weak monarch who believed that Belgium should emulate other European powers by establishing its own colonies in Central Africa. In 1884 at a conference of European leaders in Berlin, Leopold held himself out as a kind of protector of the Congo’s people and proposed the formation of a political entity there called the Congo Free State.
Leopold formed a corporation with himself as the lone shareholder and funded Stanley to return to the Congo region to build a railway deep into the jungle that would allow for the systematic looting of its natural resources, primarily rubber and ivory. Extraordinary brutality followed. Leopold’s men enslaved natives and literally worked them to death. Families were separated, noncompliant villages burned, and those who disobeyed the brutal security apparatus, the Force Publique, had their right hands chopped off, or worse.
The savagery went unchallenged until a report written by a British consul named Roger Casement detailed the horrors that had befallen the people of the Congo—he estimated that three million had died, while current scholars put the number at between five and ten million—causing an uproar in Europe that gave birth to the modern human rights movement and that eventually, in 1908, forced Leopold to cede control of the Congo Free State to the Belgian parliament.
The Belgian government oversaw the Congo for another fifty-two years, during which it gradually lost control to ethnic and regional leaders. The emergence of African nationalism further weakened Belgian control of its colony, and in 1960, the Republic of Congo was granted independence. A parliament of regional leaders in Congo elected a nationalist named Patrice Lumumba as prime minister.
The new nation was really an arbitrary assemblage of ethnic groups and tribes with little in common save their location within an imposed and haphazardly drawn border, so ethnic and tribal tensions immediately set in. Lumumba, after turning to the Soviet Union for backing, was tortured and killed by a commander named Joseph Desire Mobutu, an act done with the blessing, if not the outright aid, of the CIA.
Mobutu renamed the country Zaire and appointed himself president, a post he held for thirty-two years with the support of the United States, which was eager to have a Cold War ally in the heart of Africa. Mobutu soon became the caricature of a violent, dictatorial kleptocrat. Recognizable to Westerners for his leopard-skin pillbox hat and gaudy large-frame glasses, Mobutu bought villas and yachts in Europe, flew around on the Concorde, and stashed billions of dollars in Swiss banks, including one he bought for himself. To distract the public from his misrule, he fomented ethnic rivalries and supported guerrilla movements in neighboring countries that killed countless civilians. Nevertheless, President Ronald Reagan praised Mobutu as “a voice of good sense and good will.”
But when the Cold War ended, financial and political support from Washington waned. To continue funding his extravagance, Mobutu simply appropriated the national treasury, printing money whenever he needed it, which led to staggering inflation that further weakened his failing country.
An aging Mobutu supported Hutu militias in the eastern districts of his country and in Rwanda, militias that ultimately contributed to the Rwandan genocide. He then found his country destabilized when hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees fled into refugee camps in the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, fearing retribution from Tutsis in Rwanda. Mobutu’s own army allied with Hutus in those camps, a move that led a broad coalition of Tutsis and other ethnic groups in eastern Zaire to form their own militia and join forces with the governments of Rwanda and Uganda against Mobutu. The leader of this coalition was a man named Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a former Marxist rebel who had been educated in France and was, until his rapid ascension to power, a relative unknown in Congo. Kabila’s coalition defeated Mobutu’s entrenched regime with surprising ease, and in May 1997, Kabila entered Kinshasa and declared himself president of a country he renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mobutu fled the country for Morocco, where he died a few months later.
PAULA AND JOSEPH Balegamire were from Bukavu, the capital city of South Kivu on the border with Rwanda, which had been overrun with Hutu refugees in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. Paula taught dressmaking and her husband was an information officer at a local farmers’ collective. They were Tutsis—and allied with a group in Laurent Kabila’s coalition led by a military commander named Anselme Masasu Nindaga. When Kabi
la assumed the presidency in Kinshasa, he brought Masasu, as he was more commonly known, along with other generals to work in his new government, and the commanders in turn brought along people of their own ethnic groups and regions. The Balegamires joined up and moved from the east to Kinshasa. But Kabila soon revealed he had little interest in maintaining this broad coalition. He appointed close friends and family to government positions, began to jail political dissidents and human rights advocates, and prevented the United Nations from investigating the slaughter of thousands of refugees in eastern Rwanda, for which his own men were responsible. He soon fell out with his former ally Anselme Masasu Nindaga as well, whom he suspected of plotting a coup. In 1997 Kabila had Masasu arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
During the next two years the Kabila government engaged in a relentless purge of anyone it thought might have been associated with the plots against him—especially Tutsis from eastern Congo, and anyone who had ever had anything to do with Masasu. As Tutsis from Kivu, the Balegamires were especially vulnerable. According to a report by Amnesty International, “Anyone from the Kivu region, or with links to the region, appears to have been at risk of arrest and incommunicado detention without any judicial authorization or supervision.” Some were tortured, others “disappeared.” Congo was descending once again into an all-out ethnic war.
Paula and Joseph began to fear for their lives. Paula took her children out of Kinshasa and headed east, traveling by bus to Rwanda and eventually traversing Lake Tanganyika to Tanzania and, later, Zambia. Eventually, Paula concluded that conditions were safe enough to return to Kinshasa, after a month on the move, but soon after she arrived with her children, violence against those from the east resumed.
In January, a group of twenty-nine men—most of them former associates of Masasu, including Joseph Balegamire—left Kinshasa in small dug-out canoes and paddled across five kilometers of the muddy Congo River to Brazzaville, the capital city of the former French colony the Republic of Congo, in an effort to escape the violence. The men took refuge in a small house on Franceville Street that had been rented by a fellow refugee from across the river. When the house became too crowded, nineteen of the men, including Joseph, moved to another small house at 373 rue Lweme, in the Plateau des 15 Ans section of Brazzaville. The men received letters from the United Nations, noting that they had been in touch with the organization—important protection should they encounter deportation threats from the local government. They sought out representatives of Amnesty International to inform them about the torture, disappearances, and killings of people from Kivu that were being carried out by the Kabila government across the river.
Outcasts United Page 7
