Learning America

One Woman's Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children

Luma Mufleh

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780358569725
• eBook ISBN:
  9780358566168
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

“[From] an influential educational leader and activist…an impassioned, penetrating critique and inspiring model for progress.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

It was a wrong turn that changed everything. When Luma Mufleh—a Muslim, gay, refugee woman from hyper-conservative Jordan—stumbled upon a pick-up game of soccer in Clarkston, Georgia, something compelled her to join.  The players, 11- and 12-year-olds from Liberia, Afghanistan, and Sudan, soon welcomed her as coach of their ragtag but fiercely competitive group. Drawn into their lives, Mufleh learned that few of her players, all local public school students, could read a single word. She asks, “Where was the America that took me in? That protected me? How can I get these kids to that America?”

This powerful memoir, Learning America, traces the story of how Mufleh grew a group of kids into a soccer team and then into a nationally acclaimed network of schools for refugee children. The journey is inspiring and hard-won: Fugees schools accept only those most in need; no student passes a grade without earning it; the failure of any student is the responsibility of all. Soccer as a part of every school day is a powerful catalyst to heal trauma, create belonging, and accelerate learning. Finally, this gifted storyteller delivers provocative, indelible portraits of student after student making leaps in learning that aren’t supposed to be possible for children born into trauma—stories that shine powerful light on the path to educational justice and illuminate the modern immigrant experience for all of America’s most left-behind.

• A Fight for Educational Justice: Discover the hard-won journey of creating the Fugees, a nationally acclaimed network of schools that holds itself responsible for the failure and success of every refugee student.
• Healing Childhood Trauma: Learn how soccer becomes a powerful catalyst to heal trauma, create a sense of belonging, and accelerate learning for children who have survived the unimaginable.
• An Unforgettable Refugee Story: Follow Luma Mufleh—a gay, Muslim, refugee woman from Jordan—as a wrong turn in Clarkston, Georgia leads her to find her life’s purpose and challenge the American education system.
• A Powerful Social Justice Read: An impassioned and penetrating critique of a system that fails its most left-behind students, offering an inspiring model for progress that will spark conversation for any book club.

Part I

1

Why Don’t You Go Back?

MY GRANDMOTHER COMPLETED THE SEVENTH GRADE. That was the end of her formal education. She was married at fifteen and a mother at sixteen. Over the next five years, she gave birth to four more children. None of this was unusual for a middle-class family in Damascus, Syria, in the 1950s.

In 1964, when my grandmother was pregnant with her sixth child, everything changed. Syria was shaken by civil unrest that was followed by a violent military coup. Soldiers occupied nearly every corner of Damascus’s ancient streets. Syrians were pitted against one another: urban against rural, merchants against farmers, brother against brother. This is what a civil war does; it unstitches the fabric of a country and tears apart the colors and textures that made it beautiful in the first place.

She didn’t need a diploma to know that something was very wrong now, that she could no longer keep her children safe. Call it a survival instinct or a mother’s special way of knowing; whatever it was, it made her—pregnant belly and all—pack five children into the family car and drive away from the only home she had ever known. Only 129 miles separate Damascus and Amman, but they were the difference between life and death.

My grandfather stayed behind, believing that things would blow over, like the time before and the time before that. There had always been unrest, talk of change. There was no reason for alarm, he insisted; surely his wife and children would be back soon.

Instead, two months later, my grandfather followed the same dusty highway to Amman. His factories had been seized by the government. His brothers had been tortured. Syria was unrecognizable, a police state.

My mother—my grandmother’s firstborn—was sixteen years old when the family fled to Jordan. Her whole world had been taken away: the country she loved, the extended family and the apartment building they all shared, her school, and her friends. For a while, she told herself that the move was just temporary, that they would stay in Jordan for a few months then return to Damascus; surely things would go back to normal in Syria soon. But at her parents’ insistence, she enrolled in school in Amman.

It didn’t go well. Classmates and teachers alike mocked her French-inflected Syrian accent, her halting English (Jordan, having been colonized by the British, was an English- and Arabic-speaking society while neighboring Syria primarily spoke French and Arabic). To this day, my mother understands English perfectly well but refuses to speak it in almost any setting.

Even though Jordan and Syria share a border and many cultural similarities, my mother was immediately identified and treated as other, as different, as less than. At first, she fought back. She told her classmates that Syria was the better country anyway.

“Then why don’t you go back?” they retorted.

After a few months, she refused to go to school. My grandparents didn’t know what to do. They weren’t going to let her drop out. They were committed to making sure every one of their children had an education, something fairly rare in the region at that time.

“Please go to school today, it will get better, just give it time,” they begged.

“It won’t. I hate it here. Why can’t we go home? Please, let’s go home.”

My grandparents were torn. My mother was unhappy, but she was safe. She was in school, but she was not learning. They had made it out of Syria, unlike so many of their neighbors, but would they ever truly belong in this new place?

They eventually gave in and sent my mother back to Syria to finish high school. She would live with her aunt for two years until she graduated and returned to Jordan—that was the plan. For a brief moment, things were as good as they could be for her. She was without her siblings and her parents, but she was home. She returned to her beloved Catholic school, overjoyed to see the teachers and friends she had left behind.

My mother’s reclaimed normalcy was short-lived. The regime soon began shutting down all nongovernment schools. She remembers standing on the playground as she watched armed soldiers march the nuns out of the building—as if they were criminals, these women who had taught her how to read and write. She remembers the moment when she and her classmates ran to them, begging them not to go. The soldiers tried to place their rifles between the girls and the nuns, but the teenagers would not be deterred. They were determined to say goodbye at least. Syria would never be the same.

I was born in 1975 in Amman, a place constantly in the cross fire of regional violence. I don’t remember a time during my childhood when there wasn’t a conflict swelling or a war unfolding in a bordering country. Because of my family’s wealth and Jordan’s good relationship with the United States, we enjoyed some semblance of normalcy. But the drums of war always beat steadily in the background, and we knew implicitly that our lives could be upended overnight.

My parents put me in an Arabic-speaking school when I was five. I think they did it to resist the lingering colonialist influence in the region, the idea that the West did things better than everyone else. They were fiercely Arab; sending me to an Arab school, in many ways, was an act of patriotism. But as with most parents, their commitment to an ideal went only as far as their own child’s well-being. After a teacher struck me with a ruler for speaking out of turn, my mother immediately pulled me out of the school.

I began attending a school run by the British embassy. My first few weeks were difficult, to say the least. In my family, we spoke only Arabic. All of a sudden, I was sitting in a class where instruction and conversation happened completely in English. The only kids I had ever interacted with were Arab kids; now my classmates were from all over the world: Japan, India, England, Nigeria, Scotland, Switzerland. Unlike my old teachers, these teachers didn’t wear a hijab, and their skirts ended at the knee. My PE teacher wore shorts.

I would come home complaining of pounding headaches, telling my parents that I just wanted to go to sleep. My mom was worried that she was watching her daughter relive her own terrible experience. She would ask my dad if they should consider switching me again. “Just give it time; she’s young,” he would reassure her.

For a while, I faked my way through. I excelled in—and loved—the classes that didn’t require me to speak English. In art, I could draw by copying what the teacher was showing us. In PE, I could run and throw a ball without having to say a word. And in music, I could sing at the top of my lungs because I was simply imitating a sound; what the song meant, I had no idea. Eventually, through total immersion and the dedication of truly wonderful teachers, I began to learn English. I began to love school.

I attended a British dual-language middle school and went on to an American high school. When I was applying to college, British and American universities were the only ones I considered. I believed very strongly that Western education was the best the world had to offer and that everyone who lived in those countries had received an education like mine. I thought that the disrespect and parochialism my mother had experienced in her Amman school didn’t happen in developed countries.

In addition to her aversion to English, my mother still bristles when I call her a refugee. To her, that word is heavy with shame and suffering, and she is quick to downplay her own ordeal. It’s true, despite all of the loss and the trauma, that our family was profoundly lucky. But our history shaped us and continues to shape us today.

When I was eight years old, my grandmother took me to a Palestinian refugee camp outside Amman. It was important to her that I understand our family’s journey, how easily things could have been different for us. At first, I was terrified. I had never seen anything like this place—rows and rows of tents shaking in the unrelenting desert wind, everything in sight a shade of brown.

My grandmother had brought things for the women at the camp, clothes and food, and she told me to go play while she visited with them. Still hiding behind her legs, I refused.

“I don’t want to play,” I said. “I want to stay with you.”

My grandmother knelt down beside me, and with a sternness she seldom used, said: “Don’t ever think people are beneath you, and don’t think you have nothing to learn from others. Go.”

I did as I was told. I walked hesitantly to the sidelines of a pickup game of soccer on the camp’s makeshift field. After a few moments, one of the kids waved me in. Soon, my fear was gone, replaced by a feeling of camaraderie. These kids were no different from me despite how they looked or where they lived.

After a few hours of playing, I ran to find my grandmother. I couldn’t wait to tell her how much fun I’d had; I wanted her to be proud of me.

“Haram,” I said, as we walked out of the camp. Poor them.

“Haram on us,” my grandmother said, using the word in a different way—that we were sinning. “Don’t feel sorry for them. Believe in them.”

Today, a staggering seventy million people have been forced to leave their homes due to war, persecution, or human rights violations—the highest levels in recorded history. Only .01 percent of them will ever be resettled. These are numbers that are hard to get your head around and a problem that’s too easy to dismiss as someone else’s.

Historically, the United States has admitted more refugees than any other country, but the number of people we resettle has been tumbling for years. From 2016 to 2020, refugee resettlement in America dropped nearly 85 percent, from approximately 85,000 people to slightly more than 11,000 at the end of the Trump administration. As I write this, the Biden administration appears to be reversing course after critics slammed its initial 2021 refugee cap of 15,000, the lowest in history.

You don’t have to be particularly news savvy to read or hear the word “refugee” often. Yet the refugee resettlement system in the United States remains a mystery for many of us. Perhaps your community has a large Somali or Iraqi population. Perhaps you’ve always wondered how they came to live in your city.

Here’s how it typically unfolds in this country. After a years-long and invasive screening process, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recommends an applicant for resettlement in the United States based on their circumstances and the danger they face in their home country. Each refugee or refugee family is then assigned to one of the nine domestic resettlement agencies that have a cooperative agreement with the US Department of State. Some of those agencies are familiar to us, large organizations like the International Rescue Committee or Catholic Charities; others are smaller affiliates. Their job is to facilitate refugees’ journeys to America and their first months in the country, picking them up at the airport, securing an apartment, and helping them find a job—checking all the logistical boxes. Resettlement agencies aren’t created equal, though, and a positive experience often hinges on the tireless, thankless work of resettlement workers.

Today, the majority of refugees come from African countries, but that is largely due to the Trump administration’s travel ban, a policy that sharply limited the numbe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Jordan in Georgia
• Part I
• Part II
• Epilogue: An Opportunity Like No Other
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix I: Seeking Asylum
• Appendix II: Refugee Resettlement
• Appendix III: CHEEER
• Notes
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher