Learning America
One Woman's Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
A visionary leader’s powerful personal story and a blueprint for change that will inspire schools and communities across America
Luma Mufleh—a Muslim woman, a gay refugee from hyper-conservative Jordan—joins a pick-up game of soccer in Clarkston, Georgia. The players, 11- and 12-year-olds from Liberia and Afghanistan and Sudan, have attended local schools for years. Drawn in as coach of a ragtag but fiercely competitive team, Mufleh discovers that few of her players can read a word. She asks, “Where was the America that took me in? That protected me? How can I get these kids to that America?”
For readers of Malala, Paul Tough, and Bryan Stevenson, Learning America is the moving and insight-packed story of how Luma Mufleh grew a soccer team into a nationally acclaimed network of schools—by homing in laserlike on what traumatized students need in order to learn. Fugees accepts only those most in need: students recruit other students, and all share a background of war, poverty, and trauma. No student passes a grade without earning it; the failure of any student is the responsibility of all. Most foundational, everyone takes art and music and everyone plays soccer, areas where students make the leaps that can and must happen—as this gifted refugee activist convinces—even for America’s most left-behind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mufleh—founder of Fugees Family, a network of schools devoted to educating refugees—chronicles in this magnificent debut how a pickup soccer game transformed her life. When, in 2004, a "wrong turn" brought the then-soccer coach to a Georgia refugee settlement community where six boys were kicking around a ball, Mufleh was immediately reminded of her childhood in Jordan. "To me," she writes, "there was nothing strange about... asking to join their game." What unfolds is an incredible story that follows Mufleh as she ushers these boys into YMCA leagues and works to establish a national network of schools for refugee communities, one far better than the schools they had to navigate—"systems that ha no idea what to do with them." Mufleh also nimbly tells the "redemption story" she struggled to fashion after coming out to her family while attending college in the U.S. in the '90s and applying for asylum—"as a gay woman, it would have been dangerous... for me to return to Jordan." Most inspiring, though, is the powerful conviction with which Mufleh writes about supporting those, who, like her, are still fighting for their American dream: "As we continue to turn a blind eye to the huddled masses at our door, it's not their humanity we're betraying, it's our own." Readers will be stunned.
