Coach's Story About Helping Refugees Touches Many

Luma Mufleh enthralled an overflow crowd at Garfield Middle School on December 6 as she told her tale of her journey from being a privileged child in Jordan to becoming the inspirational leader of a soccer team, the Fugees, which is made up of refugee boys from war-torn countries. Mufleh’s bond with her players eventually drove her to create a business to employ refugee family members, run a tutoring center and develop the first academy for refugees in the country.

Mufleh came to Lakewood as part of the Community Conversations series sponsored by Facing History & Ourselves and the Allstate Foundation. Facing History helps teachers develop curriculum that teaches students about making the right choices in the face of discrimination and intolerance. Lakewood High has been teaching Facing History courses for years and because of the close connection the school has had with the organization, LHS’ Race & Diversity Club, led by teacher Joe Lobozzo, was asked to be a co-host of the event.

The audience learned how Mufleh, who lives outside of Atlanta, struggled for years to find a purpose following her graduation from Smith College until she came upon a rag-tag bunch of boys playing soccer on a make-shift scruffy field with a beat-up ball and no shoes. As a former player and coach, something drew her to these boys, and after a number of times joining them in their games, she decided to form a team – the Fugees. The team gave the boys, from places such as Sudan, the Congo, Afghanistan and Bosnia, a place to feel safe and to learn to cope with a new and totally different world.

After a while, Mufleh realized that the boys “had become my extended family” and she knew she could no longer just be their coach but needed to help find ways for them and their families to succeed in America. She created a cleaning company, Fresh Start, that would employ and pay a fair wage to the players’ family members as cleaners. Her latest venture is to start a food truck company where family members will serve as the chefs.

Since that first team Mufleh put together in 2004, the Fugees concept has grown into Fugees Family, an organization that includes four soccer teams, a tutoring program, the first academy for refugee boys and girls in the country, an academic camp, a tutoring center and more. Fugees Family organization recently celebrated its first college graduate this past May.

Mufleh’s lessons of acceptance, love, perseverance and emphasis on education with her players resonated with many in the audience, which included many students from Lakewood High, Garfield and other surrounding community schools. During a question-and-answer session following Mufleh’s speech, many students lined up at the microphone to ask Mufleh’s thoughts on everything from how it felt to become a U.S. citizen to why she didn’t decide to go back to Jordan to help out her native country, to which she answered: “I know my limits … I would not be able as a woman to do there what I have here.”

Her inspirational story of helping those with the least resources in her community was a lesson to all in the audience and one that can easily be applied to us here in Lakewood.

To find out more about Fugees Family, go to www.fugeesfamily.org.