Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  But the Islamist regime that came to power in a 1989 coup had no intention of leaving the Nuba alone. The government wanted access to the vital soil of the Nuba valleys, a rich source of food in the midst of an otherwise nearly barren land, where control of the food supply was synonymous with power. During a dry season in 1991 and 1992, the Islamic government in Khartoum declared jihad in the Nuba region and launched an offensive to drive indigenous groups from the valleys. The declaration of jihad was complicated by the fact that there were Muslims among the mostly African Nuba. But that problem was solved when a group of radical clerics in Khartoum issued a fatwa in April 1992. “An insurgent who was previously a Muslim is now an apostate,” they declared. “And a non-Muslim is a nonbeliever standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam. Islam has granted the freedom of killing both of them.”

  The government waged its jihad in the Nuba with the goal of terrorizing civilians until they fled the fertile valleys—land the government began distributing to its cronies, mostly Arab entrepreneurs from the north. The campaign was run with brutal efficiency. Clumsy government Antonov cargo planes had their bays loaded with bombs, which the Sudanese air force dropped on the clusters of round straw huts that constituted villages in the Nuba. Convoys of government troops combed civilian areas, terrorizing locals with random killings and a campaign of systematic rape intended to speed the population’s move to so-called peace camps. In a detail revealing of the government’s scorched-earth approach, Muslim soldiers destroyed any mosque they came across that had not been registered and sanctioned by Khartoum. A 1998 report by the U.S. Committee for Refugees estimated that approximately 200,000 people, or slightly less than a fifth of the total population of the Nuba region, were killed in what it called the Nuba genocide.

  ROBIN AND IDWAR’S parents, Daldoum and Smira Dikori, were relatively well off before this campaign of wanton violence began. They lived in a fertile valley, of the very sort the government in Khartoum craved. Daldoum had the equivalent of a high school education. He had land to farm, and livestock. The Dikoris were members of the Moro tribe, a mostly Christian group numbering close to 100,000, and among the largest ethnic groups in the Nuba. Their eldest son, Shamsoun, a quietly intense young man with ink black skin and piercingly white eyes, said that the many ethnic groups in the area got along well when the family lived there, and he remembers how the diversity of the region was explained to him as a child.

  “We say that there are ninety-nine different mountains in Nuba and each has its own tribe,” he said.

  Robin and Idwar were too young to remember the violence that came raining down on the family’s village in the form of fire and metal. But Shamsoun, now seventeen and a member of the Under 17 Fugees, remembers the first time he saw the planes.

  “We were playing outside and we thought it was birds,” he said. “Then the bombs started to fall and everyone started running.”

  WHEN THE BOMBINGS came, villagers fled for the mountains, as the government had hoped. The men, Shamsoun said, first escorted their children and wives into the hills—journeys that took days—and then returned to their villages to salvage what possessions they could before the government convoys arrived. Daldoum was lucky. He managed to round up a few goats, cows, and a donkey, to help him carry goods and farm the land. The family built a hut in a small makeshift village with other Moro, avoiding the “peace camps” and farming the surrounding hillsides to produce enough food to survive, but not much more. After five months of barely subsisting in the mountains, the family gave up and moved to stay with relatives who had moved to Khartoum, where at least they had food.

  “They had open markets where you could buy stuff,” Shamsoun remembered. “It was pretty hot. It was not like the Nuba Mountains. They were green. There was a lot of dirt in the streets and lots of people. I didn’t feel safe.”

  THE ISLAMIST GOVERNMENT in Khartoum didn’t make life easy for the displaced Christians who descended upon the capital looking for work, food, and housing. The government sought to mandate military service for the men—and to send them, in effect, back into the south or into the Nuba Mountains to continue the campaign of terror that had led these very people to arrive destitute in Khartoum to begin with. Government-backed henchmen demanded that Christians convert to Islam and change their Christian names to Muslim ones. There were haphazard detentions, and a steady campaign of harassment. Eventually, the Dikori family decided to leave and to join the tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees streaming into Egypt in search of, if not economic opportunity, at least a respite from the overt and relentless persecution of Africans and Christians in the Sudan. Daldoum put together enough money to transport his family from Khartoum to Egypt, a two-day journey on a packed and run-down train. Eventually, the Dikoris made it to Cairo, where they connected with friends.

  Cairo, while a reprieve from the constant threat of violence, was no paradise. After a failed assassination attempt in Addis Ababa that he blamed on the Sudanese government, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had rescinded a treaty between Sudan and Egypt that allowed unfettered passage between the two countries; entering Egypt for most Sudanese now meant entering illegally. Refugees were not allowed to work either; they had to scrape by in the underground economy, and they were not eligible for the subsidized housing offered to Egyptian citizens. Africans in Egypt also faced racial discrimination—they were disparaged as “chocolata” or “honga bonga” by some hostile Egyptians, who were growing weary of their uninvited guests. An incident in July 2000 in Cairo, where the Dikoris were living in a cramped apartment with four different families, underscored the accumulating ill will. A public bus struck a Sudanese man in front of a church with a mostly Sudanese congregation. A group of Sudanese men gathered to insist that the injured man be taken to a hospital. Tempers flared in the 110-degree heat, and soon a mob of angry Egyptians had formed as well, on a false rumor that Sudanese men had taken the bus driver hostage inside the church. The two mobs threw objects at each other and the Egyptians set fire to a pastor’s car before riot police were called in. A week later, the pro-government weekly Rose El Youssef published a front-page piece with the headline “Refugees: Guests or Criminals?”

  “Many African immigrants are engaging in illicit activities such as drug dealing,” the story read. “They get drunk in the streets and harass women, throw wild parties, and in general act like hooligans. Is this a way for guests in our country to behave?”

  Daldoum had no intention of keeping his family—his wife, Smira; daughters Sara, Gimba, and Banga; and sons Shamsoun, Idwar, and Robin—in such conditions for very long. He went to the teeming and overburdened United Nations refugee office in Cairo and applied for resettlement. Odds were long—the office was rejecting more than 70 percent of applicants at the time—but the Dikoris were among the lucky minority. In 2000, the family received word that they had been accepted for relocation to the United States and a place called Georgia.

  The Dikoris arrived in May 2000. Idwar was just six and Robin four, but Shamsoun, the eldest, was eleven, and remembers well his reaction to the alien scenery that unfolded before him when he stepped off the plane. He was particularly afraid, he said, of the escalators in the Atlanta airport, which looked like the churning teeth of some giant trash compactor. His father nudged him along, and young Shamsoun held on for dear life as the moving stairway carried him toward the unknown.

  The family did their best to settle in. They were taken first to Jubilee, a camp of sorts in northern Georgia run by Christian volunteers, who help refugee families adjust to their first few weeks in America. The Dikoris took English lessons and learned about American culture. But the most puzzling aspects of American culture would reveal themselves later, when the Dikoris moved outside of Clarkston to Stone Mountain. The strangest part of life in the United States, Shamsoun said, was the diffidence of Americans toward refugees and immigrants. Americans seemed to look through him, and no one seemed the least bit curious about how this stranger wo
und up in their midst.

  “In my country,” Shamsoun said, “if someone comes from out of the country, people want to talk to them and get to know them. Here, it’s almost like they’re afraid of you.”

  The kids enrolled in school. Their English improved. Daldoum got a job at a construction supply company, and saved enough for a car, a Mazda minivan that could accommodate his big, tight-knit family. And on November 27, 2002, Daldoum and Smira decided to take their children to visit a family of fellow Sudanese refugees who’d also made it safely to the United States and who had been resettled in Tennessee. The trip was also a chance to explore the family’s new, unfamiliar sense of personal liberty. In their new home, they were free to travel as they liked, without fear of getting stopped, harassed, or detained by authorities who were hostile toward their ethnicity or religion. The timing of the trip was particularly poignant: the Wednesday before the family’s second Thanksgiving in America. They piled into the Mazda van, all eight of them. Like many refugees who’d arrived recently in Clarkston, Daldoum didn’t have a lifetime of driving experience. The route he chose followed Interstate 24, a winding, scenic, and sometimes treacherous road that wends through the southern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Chattanooga. Daldoum took the wheel proudly, and the family set off for Tennessee in the late afternoon.

  The family made it to Tennessee, about two hours north of Atlanta, and was driving through the hills just north of the Georgia and Alabama state lines, and just east of Chattanooga. It was a dark and cool night, but the roads were dry. Daldoum was traveling in the left lane of the westbound side of Interstate 24 between mile marker 164 and 165, a gradual left-hand curve. A trucker named Thomas Combs was traveling ahead of the van, and looked in his side-view mirror just in time to see the vehicle drift to the left and onto the shoulder between the west- and eastbound arteries of the roadway. Daldoum jerked the wheel to the right. Combs saw the van swerve onto the Interstate and begin to tip onto its left side. The van then rolled violently, flipping numerous times across both westbound lanes before coming to a stop, upside down, on the grassy shoulder. Combs hit the brakes, pulled off the road, and ran back to help.

  A crash report by Tennessee state troopers offers a chilling rendering of the scene before Combs. The diagram shows the car veering off the left-hand side, then tumbling down I-24 in a trajectory that took it back across both lanes of westbound traffic. On the diagram there are three marks on the open roadway, in the direction the vehicle was traveling, and another alongside the van’s final resting place on the grass, numbered one through four. Beneath the diagram there is a key:

  The trooper who filed the report added a note at the bottom. “The father knew the names of the children, but did not know their dates of birth,” he wrote. “The family are refugees and have no medical records.”

  SHAMSOUN DIKORI CAME to lying prone on the ground beside the wreck. There was a woman looking down at him, trying to wake him up—he remembers her as a nurse who had stopped to help out. His father appeared a moment later, looking down at him, asking if Shamsoun was all right.

  “I could see from his face that something was really wrong,” Shamsoun said. Robin, Idwar, and Shamsoun were taken to two separate hospitals. The younger boys had only cuts and bruises, but Shamsoun had a head injury and a week-long hospital stay. Soon the two boys were back in Stone Mountain, a world away from where they’d grown up and now without their mother and three sisters.

  The next months were trying. Robin began to act out at school, while Idwar retreated into silence. Daldoum continued to work, but his demeanor offered little solace to his children.

  “Our father doesn’t show a lot of affection—that’s how it is with African parents,” Shamsoun said. “Robin started messing up in school—not paying attention, getting mad quicker. Idwar keeps most things to himself and didn’t talk to anyone else about problems he was having.

  “It’s hard to live without your mom,” he said.

  As the oldest brother, Shamsoun did his best to step in and support his younger brothers. But he was a teenager himself, grieving and lost in a strange world. He took his own solace from the occasional pickup games of soccer that he played on weekends and after school. But the games were for older boys and men; Idwar and Robin were too young to join in. During one of those neighborhood games at Indian Creek Elementary, Shamsoun looked at the other end of the field and saw a group of young refugees gathering to try out for the Fugees. He asked a friend for an introduction to the coach, and joined in, bringing his younger brothers later on. They were young—Robin especially, who was four years behind most of the players on Luma’s youngest team. But she brought Idwar and Robin on board, assuming they’d find roles on the team in future seasons, as they got older. That was before she recognized how fast they were.

  Robin calmed down at school and became outgoing with his teammates. Idwar, still quiet and shy, transformed on the field into a confident young man. 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.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “What Are You Doing Here?”

  Every coach the Fugees played wanted to win, but for David Anderson, the head coach of the Athens Gold Valiants, his team’s current undefeated season represented a triumph over a much more personal struggle. A clean-cut and energetic thirty-two-year-old from Marietta, a suburb north of Atlanta, Anderson had battled a lifetime of chronically low self-esteem and a nagging feeling that there was something about himself that wasn’t quite right. His lack of selfconfidence had derailed what might have been a promising high school soccer career as a goalie. Anderson had tried out for the team his freshman year, and didn’t make the cut for the junior varsity team. Instead, the coaches assigned him to play on a scrub team they’d put together for players who hadn’t made the varsity or JV rosters. He played a season with the team, but when the next season approached, he didn’t even bother to try out. Anderson had decided he was done with soccer.

  He struggled in college, failing out of one and then another before getting fed up. He made an appointment with learning disabilities experts at the University of Georgia and underwent a day-long barrage of tests. (Twelve years later, he remembers the day as one long, harrowing session of trying to arrange colored blocks into particular shapes.) When it was over, Anderson, then twenty, received a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

  “It was a huge relief,” he said. “I’d spent so much of my time thinking I was just dumb. It was like finding a missing piece to a puzzle I’d been searching for my whole life.”

  ON SOME LEVEL, Anderson saw coaching as a way to exorcise the regrets he felt over having quit his high school soccer team. A friend recruited him to help coach at a local soccer club in Athens, and Anderson loved it. He took over as head coach for the Valiants in 2003, and drew on his own life experience, emphasizing confidence building and discipline, a style that resonated with both players and parents.

  Early on, he’d insisted the team learn to play a controlled version of the game that emphasized precise passing as opposed to long, clumsy down-the-field passes that many youth soccer teams relied on to create scoring opportunities. While his kids had struggled early on with the demands of his game plan, the parents understood Anderson had their sons’ long-term interests at heart, and they supported him despite early losses. It began to pay off.

  The Valiants’ star player was a diminutive and rabbit-quick forward from Austria named Jonathan Scherzer. Scherzer—Joni (YAN-ni) to his teammates—was easily recognizable on the field for his floppy flaxen hair and his Beckham-esque ball-handling skills. He had grown up in the town of Speetal and had only recently arrived with his family in Athens, where his father, Jacob, a veterinarian, had come to study
at the University of Georgia. From the time he was three or four, Joni Scherzer had been enthralled with soccer. He would contentedly kick a ball around for hours in the backyard in Austria, by himself, and developed his soccer skills along with self-confidence. But Joni had found the transition to life in the United States difficult. He spoke no English when he arrived and found the culture alienating. He was bullied at school because of his size and accent. He had few friends. So he retreated into soccer, practicing by himself in the backyard in Georgia as he had in Austria, often for as long as two hours a day, only now with more zeal. His parents began to get concerned.

  “He was suffering for the first year,” his father said. “And he put a lot of effort at that time into his practice, taking it very seriously—sometimes too seriously. Football was an escape for Jonathan.”

  JONI DIDN’T HAVE a team to play for, so on a summer evening his father took him to a casual “kick-around” David Anderson had organized at the Athens United soccer complex. After only a few minutes of watching Joni play, Anderson walked over to a group of his regular players’ parents with a question: “Who here speaks German?” A parent raised his hand.

  “Could you go over there and ask them if he wants to be on our team?” Anderson said.