Soccer refuge for the refugees

A handmade rubber ball, a motley group of boys and a sunny day.

Growing up, that's all Newton Gborway needed to escape the poverty of his Liberian village for a few hours every afternoon.

Playing soccer in the dusty streets of his neighborhood, it was easy to forget that his family was poor and that a civil war was raging a few miles away.

"You don't need money or fancy shoes to play soccer," says Gborway, now 27 and a social worker in Salt Lake City. "All you need is a ball. With all the rubber fields outside our village, we could make our own ball and play anywhere. To us, soccer became a way of life — much more than just a game."

Knowing firsthand how a simple game like soccer can bring a community together, Gborway now coaches the Lone Stars, a team of Liberian refugees carving out new lives in Salt Lake City.

The Lone Stars and seven other soccer teams made up of refugees who fled war-torn countries will compete June 20 in a tournament at Granite High School in honor of World Refugee Day.

"It's difficult starting over in a new country, so this a way for us to get to know each other and realize that nobody is alone," says Gborway, who recently joined me for a Free Lunch chat, along with Emily Fishbein, who helps coordinate the soccer tournament and works daily with refugees.

"Soccer is a universal language," says Fishbein, 23, an International Rescue Committee worker who started a weekly pickup game for her clients. "It doesn't matter whether you're from Burma or Somalia or Iraq. People from every corner of the world are passionate about soccer."

Many of the people that she assists have tragic histories, with family members lost to violence and years spent scraping by in crowded refugee camps.

Newton Gborway hasn't seen his family since age 10, when he fled civil war in Liberia with a friend. Rather than be forced to join a rebel army, he walked for weeks with thousands of other refugees to Sierra Leone, living in a camp until he was adopted by a family in Lindon, Utah.

"My father died in the war," he says, "and I haven't seen my mother's face in almost 20 years." Besides the love from his adoptive parents, he says, one of the greatest helps in adjusting to a new life in America was playing soccer.

"It brings people together in a way nothing else can," says Gborway, who now uses the sport as a social worker to inspire children to get good grades. "For me, it was a way to overcome all the horrible things I went through and to be happy. Even when you play a country you were at war with, it's good energy."