TEEN REFUGEES FIND HOME ON SOCCER FIELD
In a new land where they don’t always feel welcome, young Africans forge a kinship in Texas
The boys in royal blue huddled in the middle of a soccer field, arms locked, heads bowed, their lucky hot pink socks a sharp contrast to the browning grass and storm-threatening sky striated with slate and gray. ❚ In a few minutes, members of the reVision Football Club would play their final match of the fall season. If they won, they would qualify for a state soccer cup for the first time by beating last year’s champions. ❚ They would defy the odds – as they have been doing all their lives.
Most of the teenage players were born in refugee camps in Africa and arrived in this country with nothing, save a few phrases in English and the yearning for a better life.
Here, they found a different kind of struggle: new languages and unfamiliar cultures, classrooms where they are bullied for their accent and skin color, hardscrabble apartment complexes where street gangs fish for fresh recruits — and now, a president whose policies are no longer welcoming for refugees.
But one thing has remained constant. From Africa to America, they have found ways to keep playing soccer.
In the beautiful game, they discovered strength and self-confidence. In this team, which came together almost
by accident, they forged a brotherhood. In their stories, they offer a glimpse into the challenges confronted by refugee children – who in 2016 made up about 44 percent of those resettled in the United States.
Now, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the reVision FC squad gathered in a scrum on Field 26 in Bear Creek Pioneers Park in northwest Houston, ready to face Cedar Stars Academy-Green.
No matter what happens, team captain Francois Elize, 18, who was born in Congo, told the others, we will not hang our heads down.
“ReVision on three!” they yelled. “One! Two! Three! ReVision!”
A place to belong
Iluta Shabani, who came to the USA three years ago and dreams of playing pro soccer, heard about the games from a friend passing by on a bicycle.
Every Sunday, he told Iluta, a group of boys converge to play pickup soccer on a grassy expanse behind St. Luke’s United Methodist Church Gethsemane, a church in the heart of the city’s refugee enclaves.
Iluta grew up in the vast Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania, where he used plastic bottles and wadded bags as makeshift balls. The 17-year-old followed his friend to the church campus – running behind him for more than
2 miles.
Erick Musambya, whose parents are from Congo, soon became a regular. So did Amani Godfrey, who left Tanzania when he was 3 and used the impromptu games as a way to distance himself from a crew that did little but hang out and smoke.
These were the kids Charles Rotramel, who runs reVision, a nonprofit that works with young people in the juvenile justice system, had hoped to draw when he turned the swatch of grass behind St. Luke’s into a soccer pitch.
Most were refugees from Africa who didn’t quite fit in with Spanish-speaking Latino classmates or English-speaking African American peers. Their parents worked long hours for meager wages, leaving them alone for stretches of time.
They were looking for a place to belong – making them ripe targets for gangs like the Southwest Cholos and
MS-13 that plague the southwest Houston neighborhood.
Soccer, Rotramel thought, could be a way to keep them from getting entangled in street life.
He quickly realized how good the ragtag bunch of players were. How they delighted in the touch of the ball. How the boys, who barely knew one another, seemed to move in harmony.
It was a team waiting to be formed. That, two years ago, was the start of reVision FC – and the birth of something bigger than soccer.
Band of brothers
With more than a week to go before the match against Cedar Stars-Green, the game room inside the reVision offices was brimming with tumult – noise and laughter, the clatter of pool balls and the clacking of a foosball game, snatches of singing and snippets of Swahili. As it always is on practice nights.
Above a row of red and black lockers, a single word was painted high on the wall: Familia.
Family.
That is what this team has become. “They were looking for a safe place and found it in each other,” Rotramel said. “They are creating a magical space of family for each other.”
It was here that Iluta, who has had to be the man of his family – looking after younger siblings, helping his mother in her wheelchair with errands and household chores, serving as translator – found a support system of his own.
A few months back, after his mother, a single parent of five left who was severely disabled during the civil war in Congo, fell short of rent money, reVision stepped in to cover the costs.
“They are like my brothers,” said Iluta, an 11th-grader at Margaret Long Wisdom High School, where refugee students come from 29 countries. “When I don’t have something, they give it to me. When they don’t have, I give it to them.”
It was here that Amani soaked in stories about refugee camps in Tanzania, the country he can’t remember. Here that the teenager learned Swahili (at home, his mother speaks Kirundi, the language of her native Burundi).
The Wisdom High School junior, who has a 3.65 GPA, a talent for art and a path to college, looks back now at his old friends and sees where he might have ended up: “smoking, getting shot, or shooting.”
It was here that Rotramel had to counsel his team after an especially ugly soccer match in which opposing players and their parents hurled racial epithets at the reVision players. “It is not OK,” Rotramel consoled them. “But it’s America. This is the reality.”
Here where they talk about a political climate increasingly hostile to refugees.
Only 22,491 refugees were admitted in the past fiscal year, the second-lowest level on record. This year, the U.S. State Department plans to cap refugee admissions at 30,000.
They worry that the drastic cuts will make it nearly impossible for family members still in Africa – like Iluta’s grandparents – to join those already here. They worry that accepting any public benefits will hurt their chances of becoming U.S. citizens, a possibility under a regulation change proposed by the Trump administration.
Then there’s the rhetoric painting refugees as safety threats or drains on the system, despite numerous studies that show neither is true.
Erick, who arrived in the United States five years ago knowing no English, knows what it is like to be judged by his accent and appearance. He also knows how to plow ahead.
After fleeing Congo for Tanzania, Erick’s family spent 10 years in the Tongogara refugee camp in Zimbabwe, where he had to steal food and eat wild birds to survive.
Last winter, he came home after soccer practice to find the apartment empty. His mother, looking for work, had moved with his siblings to Kansas City, Missouri.
Rotramel offered encouragement. Iluta offered a place to stay. Soccer offered a purpose.
“Some people judge me for the way I look, but they can’t pull me down,” shrugged Erick, 18, an aspiring medic who plans to go on to community college. “I always keep going.”
‘Hungry’ for a win
As soon as reVision took the field against Cedar Stars, they were pushing to the goal.
In the 18th minute, a kick by reVision’s No. 9 – 18-year-old Antoine Kamengele, who is from Congo – that seemed to be off the mark was somehow deflected and ambled into the net.
Goal! ReVision FC, 1. Cedar StarsGreen, 0.
“Simba zina njaa,” Amani, who turned 18 that day, called to his teammates. The Swahili phrase, which he says whenever reVision scores a goal, means “The lion is hungry.”
The other team, now flustered, earned fouls and yellow warning cards. The reVision players continued to press, communicating in their own patois, a mix of English, Spanish and Swahili.
At halftime, with the score still standing at 1-0, Rotramel rallied his team. If reVision could keep up the pressure, the game could be theirs.
As storm clouds rolled in and rain droplets began to fall, the second half brought more yellow cards for rough play for Cedar Stars players.
More jeers directed at reVision from Cedar Stars fans.
The clock ticked toward the closing whistle. Rotramel paced the sideline.
“Please,” he murmured to himself, “don’t let them score on the last play.”
They didn’t. Final score: 1-0. A victory for reVision.
Smiles spread across the faces of the reVision players. Iluta jumped high in the air.
They had proven their opponents wrong. By playing their way. By heeding his favorite Swahili proverb, the one he says sums up the reVision bond:
Umoja ni nguvu. Unity is strength.