Soccer as succor: 'The Game' is a taste of home for refugees in Utah

SALT LAKE CITY — What light can manage to slips through the drawn shades in Newton Gborway's downtown apartment and splays across a mess of clothes that covers the floor and piles up high on a naked mattress in the corner.

"This place is upside down," he says. It's an apology of sorts. "I'm packing."

His trip is more than a month away, but Gborway wants everything to be perfect. For the first time in nearly 20 years, he is returning to Africa.

Gborway fled his native Liberia fearing that soldiers might force him to join their ranks. He walked with a friend for days into neighboring Sierra Leone. He left behind his father, his mother, his brother. He was 10.

Gborway became one of the 12 million people worldwide who live in refugee camps. There he spent his mornings, afternoons and evenings kicking balled-up scraps of plastic around dusty streets and dry, rocky fields until the war caught up to him and rebels broke his peace. He fled to America, into the arms of an adoptive family in Lindon.

Now he is returning home, if only for a short while.

But first there is something he needs in this cluttered studio apartment. Gborway, 28, reaches up and grabs a cardboard box that sits on a shelf.

Inside, the trophies have the shine of gold plastic, first-place soccer finishes from years past.

"The joy," he says. "That's the most important part."

This is what he wants for the Refugee All Stars, the team he manages, a mix of young men from the world's most war-torn nations. He wants them to remember the joy, to succeed — on the field and off — because, in some ways, these trophies represent the only thing each player brought with him to America: The Game.

More than 2 million refugees have resettled in the U.S. since the mid-1970s, according to Utah's Refugee Services Office. After the end of the Vietnam War, the largest number of refugees came from Southeast Asia, Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union.

In recent years, civil wars in Africa have sent an increasing number of Somalis, Sudanese and others to the U.S.

An estimated 25,000 refugees have been resettled in Utah, officials say, with about 1,000 new refugees arriving each year.

The transition is extremely challenging, says Joe Nahas, a Refugee Services program specialist.