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“I didn’t know nobody, I didn’t have no friends and I didn’t look like the other people in my class,” Mr. Chivala recalled of his first days at the school. “The kids, they looked at me because I was different.”
Win, the Burmese boy, had similar feelings. “I was the only Asian kid in the room,” he said in the living room that doubles as a bedroom for him and one of his five brothers, Pyae Phoe Aung, a 9-year-old who spends most weekends lost in his video games.
At the refugee camp in Thailand where he grew up, Win said, he played soccer with members of Myanmar’s national team, who had also fled the country after its bloody military coup in 1988. Mr. Chivala, for his part, made soccer balls at the refugee camp in Kenya by tying T-shirts tightly together, and fashioned goal posts out of branches or broomsticks.
“At the camp, we played soccer to forget,” Mr. Chivala said, shivering in a sweaty jersey after the tryout.
Here, young refugee boys play soccer to belong. Win played for his middle school’s team last year, and in March he joined Mr. Koperda’s soccer club, making his first American friends.
“We teach more than just soccer here,” said Mr. Koperda, who picked up a nimble 10-year-old boy from Myanmar at the Sept. 30 tryout. “In a nice way, we teach structure and discipline.
“Many of these kids here don’t even have the benefit of having their parents watch their games,” he added. “Refugee parents are always working and the kids are raising themselves in rough neighborhoods, but soccer can offer them some type of stability.”
Resettlement experts said that young refugee children were apt to quickly learn to speak English without an accent and adapt to school routine, but that teenagers typically found themselves in a frustrating race against time, trying to cram a full education into a few years. (Age, not academic background, determines the grade placement of refugee children in schools in the United States.)
In most cases, these teenagers have to decipher the language and culture on their own, since parents do not know it or are too busy to be able to help.
“They’re guys with big feet,” said Rubén G. Rumbaut, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the refugee experience in the United States. “They’re stumbling around, trying to figure out their place in the adult world, and they don’t always get it right.”
A 2002 study by the nonprofit Center for Multicultural Human Services in Virginia found that inadequate education, lack of family support and cultural divides may lead teenage refugees to aggression, vandalism and serious violation of rules, such as skipping or dropping out of school and running away from home.
But young refugees who take part in structured activities are less likely to get in trouble, said Julianne Duncan, associate director for children’s services in the Migration and Refugee Services office at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, one of the country’s largest resettlement agencies.
“And to a lot of these kids,” Ms. Duncan said, “a team sport like soccer works as the greatest equalizer.”
After the soccer tryouts here, Muridi, four other Bantu boys and Yo Yoh, a 13-year-old Burmese who arrived in Utica last year, went to dinner at the home of Richard Mueller, an assistant coach at the soccer club. As chicken sizzled on the grill, three of the boys played pool and Yo played table tennis with Mr. Mueller’s teenage son, Paul.
Meanwhile, Muridi and Shay Callahan, an 11-year-old girl with long blond hair who also plays soccer at the club, danced and sang along to a Justin Timberlake tune that boomed from the stereo.
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Source: New York Times, Oct. 21, 2006