I'm far from done talking about Left Coast Crime, but it's been a tiring few days for me and I haven't had it together to write a lot, so that's still coming. Meanwhile, I want to tell you about a feel-good story/issue that got my attention today.

There are so many great causes, so many issues out there that you could drive yourself into the ground trying to track and decide what to support. No matter what you care about, there’s a great charity, or a great organization or cause-related business that you can dig. I adore community garden projects, and program where I hear about inner city kids being given jobs and skills. I love the prosthetics outreach foundation, which works in countries like Viet Nam, and not only supplies war and land mine and polio victims but ensures that if their legs break, someone local will be able to fix it – that they don’t have to wait around for some American to come back to town.

Our friends Kate and Glenn subscribe to the Sunday New York Times and save it for me. Yesterday, Kate brought a couple of bags representing a few months worth of the paper and a few hours ago I picked up the Times from January 21, and read about a small Georgia town which has had a huge influx of refugees in the past several years. It’s the story about a small town in the south trying to adjust to the way the world is, and it’s not easy. Some things didn’t work well, some did. This is the story of a bunch of kids from places like Congo and Sudan, from Liberia, Afghanistan, Burundi, and Kosovo and they play soccer. And their coach is a woman. Luma Mufleh is Jordanian, and she coaches a soccer team full of boys from all over. The team is the Fugees –it’s for “refugee”.

There are problems and it’s not clear quite how things are going; Clarkston Georgia is not a place that seems to welcome the 21st century and the changes we have all had to face. But never mind that. The team exists, they’re getting some support and their story moved me. A lot. In part because of Coach Mufleh and in part because of what it says about these kids and this damn world we’re living in. (she has a list of rules for her players; my favorite is “My hair will be shorter than Coach’s.”)

It’s not easy to get past some of the obvious things in this story. The mayor was quoted from the git-go as opposing soccer played on the town’s fields; as long as he was mayor, he declared, there would be nothing but baseball played on the town fields. Of course, I don’t get this and I don’t see why it’s a big point to the mayor but it’s not something I want to get into. If I do, I think I’ll see a lot of things I don’t like about Clarkston, Georgia, and this isn’t ABOUT that. It’s a very small town (population under 8000 at the last census) and it’s had to deal with a LOT of change.

As Jesse Kornbluth wrote on his website (see http://www.headbutler.com/products/fugees.asp)

“…there is no heartless villain here. Immigration experts thought that refugees could find jobs in Atlanta and cheap housing in a county that had lots of empty apartments, and so, in just five years --- from 1996 to 2001 --- 19,000 refugees washed into DeKalb County.”

It’s asking a lot of any community and then there was 9/11. Still, not too many cities, especially very small ones, seem to really enjoy “foreigners” moving in with their “weird” ways. Never mind though, that’s not something I can fix, do much about, want to dwell on. What I want to dwell on is what playing soccer can do for a bunch of kids who’ve had lives of deprivation and horror. What the hell, it’s a teeny damn drop in a huge bucket. But it’s a story that touched me and maybe you’ll like it too.

If you’re interested, read this would you? http://tinyurl.com/2nyddk
It’s that annoying “free registration at the NYT, but you might already have done it. I did at one point, so I can get to stuff. And then, here’s the team’s website. http://www.fugeesfamily.org/. I’m sending them a few bucks because their story did something for me. It’s as simple as that.