Saturday, May 9, 2009

Outcasts United ... A Refugee Team, An American Town


This book looks like a wonderful, inspiring story. I saw the author, Warren St.John, on MSNBC's Morning Joe last week. (According to Mike Barnacle and Joe Scarborough, this needs to be made into a movie!)

From the book's website: Outcasts United is the story of a refugee soccer team, a remarkable woman coach and a small southern town turned upside down by the process of refugee resettlement.

In the 1990s, that town, Clarkston, Georgia, became a resettlement center for refugees and a modern-day Ellis Island for scores of families from war zones in Liberia, Congo, Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan. The town also became home to Luma Mufleh, an American-educated Jordanian woman who founded a youth soccer team to help keep Clarkston’s boys off the streets.

Theirs is a story about resilience in the face of extraordinary hardship, the power of one person to make a difference and the daunting challenge of creating community in a place where people seem to have so little in common.

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