Learning America: One Woman’s Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children

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[d] 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. (Apr.)