Untold stories: The refugee kids of the North Phoenix Christian Soccer Club

Sunrise orange bleeds onto Alondra Ruiz’s face as she rumbles up I-17 north toward downtown Phoenix in her silver Dodge minivan. The clock flashes 5 a.m., five hours after she went to bed.

She’s racing the sun this Friday morning to pick up refugee kids who play for the North Phoenix Christian Soccer Club. It’s a 200-member club, consisting mostly of refugees, that sits a few miles from the city’s skyline. It's not a religious club, despite the name. The kids come from 15 different countries spread over 12 teams, ages 6 to 18.

It’s completely free to join. The club’s director, 76-year-old army veteran Myles Grunewald, didn’t plan to create a refugee haven when he took over around 25 years ago. But that’s exactly what he did.

Used cleats are practically spilling out of his house — all for the kids, who normally can’t afford their own soccer equipment.

Right now Ruiz is picking up players from team Milan, the club’s 16-and-under boys squad that her husband, Miguel Vazquez, coaches. The players’ parents either don’t have a car or their work schedule keeps them from driving their kids anywhere.

So Alondra does it for free. She’s done it for free for 10 years and says she adores it beyond words.

“I love mornings,” she says, nudging glasses up her nose and adjusting her black baseball cap to shield the sun.

The clock hits 5:05 as she parks next to a house. Yueh, a defender for Milan, will be her first passenger this morning.

Normally Ruiz calls the kids before arriving and they just hop in the car and go. But she doesn’t have Yueh’s current number. He changed it. They change their numbers a lot, Ruiz says.

Yueh trudges out his door with a well-kept Grand Canyon University tank top and a not very well-kept muddle of hair on his head.

Ruiz glances up at Yueh in the rear-view mirror after they both get strapped in and settled.

“Did you go to bed early?” she asks.

Yueh smiles and shakes his head — shakes the sleep from his eyes.

“No?” Ruiz chuckles as she starts the car. “Welcome to the club.”

* Yueh *

Two nights before Friday morning's practice, Yueh talked about why his family fled Myanmar, also known as Burma, to a refugee camp in Thailand. His family hasn’t told him much. Things like wars and murdering fueled the move, but he doesn’t really know how to explain it, he says.

His mother, Paw Sen, doesn’t understand English, but she can pick up words here and there and gets the gist of the current conversation. So she interjects.

She lived in the forest from age 5 to 25. She and a large group of persecuted Karen citizens fled from the Burmese army in the 1970s. For 20 years they formed a functional nomadic city in the forests of Burma.

While hiding she became pregnant with Yueh’s older brother, who’s about to turn 19.

She starts to tell Yueh a story in their Karen language. His grandfather and four younger sisters also listen, all sitting on chairs in the sparse living room.

His mother's eyes well and she stares straight at Yueh as she speaks. She leans back in her fold-up metal chair when she's finished.

“Oh,” Yueh says and turns away from his mother. “She said when the Burmese people catch you, like say you’re pregnant, they tie you up, they torture you, they hit you. And before you die, they cut open your stomach and the baby just falls out. That’s how bad they were. It’s really dangerous.

“We have to be scared of them, my mom said.”

Yueh, now 16, came to the U.S. in 2006. He never faced anything like his mother did. Not even close. He never feared for his or his loved one’s lives growing up in a refugee camp. But his life then was nothing like it is now.

He’d go to school every day in a building made of bamboo, a long bench and long wooden table instead of individual desks. School there had a particular odor, too.

“The smell is different here,” Yueh says. “I don’t know. It was a new smell that I’d never smelled before.”

After class he’d play slingshot and shoot marbles with his friends on the dirt roads to pass time. Sometimes Yueh would wade across a raging river to watch older kids play soccer on the other side (and he’d get in trouble every time).

At night he’d come back home. No door, no windows, just a shack made of bamboo. No couches, no chairs and no bed.

“We sit on the floor, eat on the floor,” he says. “We slept on the floor but we laid out blankets so it’d have little cushions and pillows, and we have net for the mosquitos.”

Yueh says he was amazed with “all the new technologies” after leaving Thailand. But none more than the chairs and tables he saw for the first time in a Japanese hotel they stayed in before before flying to the U.S.

That was also the first night he ever slept in a bed.

“Beds, that was new,” Yueh remembers thinking. “It was little, only one bed, we all shared the bed. It was amazing.”

Yueh’s used to it now. Chairs and beds litter his home. He’s got two mattresses in his room — one for him and his younger brother, one for his grandfather. There's no lamp in there, so it's lights out when the sun goes down.

He’s been here 10 years and feels more American now, and he’ll be the first to tell you that. He and his Burmese friends don't speak their native languages. They speak English.

Yueh’s mother watches and listens to her son, understanding very little. She smiles when he smiles, laughs when he laughs. If things changed back home, she’d move back to Burma permanently. Yueh would only go to visit.

They both sit directly in front of a huge Karen flag hanging on the living room wall, with its red-and-blue sunrise in the upper-left corner and single red, white and blue stripes to the right. An American flag is pinned right in the middle, with the words “America United We Stand” below it.

* Back in the car — 5:45 a.m. *

Ruiz now has Yueh and two other Burmese refugees, Pleh and Byar, in tow as the clock hits 5:45. Practice starts at 6.

The last stop is Dawit’s apartment. It gets easier to see his bouquet of sun-bleached curly hair as Ruiz pulls closer to the complex.

“Oh that is him. It didn’t look like him,” Yueh says.

Ruiz pulls over and Dawit hops in, yellow earbuds poking out from either side of his head.

He sits down and pulls one earbud out. He yanks his shin guards up past his ankles.

“Hey, your sister’s only 7?” Ruiz asks. She and the boys were just debating on their way.

“Yeah,” he replies.

“Gosh, she looks like almost as tall as you. Is she almost as tall as you?”

"No,” Dawit quickly says.

“Oh, well that’s what it looks like in the picture,” Ruiz teases.

Dawit lets a smile escape for a second. He doesn’t do that much. He flashes one for another moment and shakes his head. He removes his second earbud and looks out the window as the van pulls away from his apartment.

* Dawit *

It’s the following Wednesday, five days after Friday morning's practice. Milan has a game tonight. They lost last week against a team they should have beaten and need to take their next two games for a good shot to make the playoffs.

But it’s 10 in the morning right now. Sounds of a kids’ TV show come from Dawit’s bedroom, which he shares with his little sister. His little brother rolls toy cars up and down the apartment’s living room walls as Dawit’s mother tends to her two infant children.

It’s loud in here. Dawit isn’t.

A co-captain midfielder on Milan, he’s much more of the lead-by-example type.

His family fled Eritrea when he was 2 after the country’s president told citizens to leave in 2002.

“They forced us to leave the country because it was war going on and they don’t want to like hurt the people, so they told us leave from the place, so we had to move,” Dawit says.

Dawit doesn’t remember leaving, but his mother does. She tells Dawit in their native language that they walked for two days straight to reach a refugee camp in Ethiopia. They stashed as much food as they could before leaving their home and everything behind, and they slept outside for those two nights, his mother says.

So to Dawit, “back home” means Ethiopia. He lived there until he and his family came to Phoenix in 2009. He’s 16 now.

The camp’s houses were fine, he says. Paved roads, a school that a bunch of kids would ditch — not him, though. He and his friends would swim in lots of the nearby rivers, play among the trees surrounding camp and pick fruit along the way to stay energized.

He tended to about 10 goats and sometimes spent entire days in the nearby forest feeding them. There was also a communal theater in the center of camp that would show big soccer games or movies — lots of Jackie Chan, Dawit says.

But he tried to spend as much time as possible with a soccer ball on his foot.

“I just played soccer,” Dawit says with a smile.

He was too young to play on the camp’s actual club team, which would travel to the “big city” to play in tournaments.

His camp was divided into five zones, so non-club members formed their own league, a tournament of zones. Zone 1 would play Zone 4 one day, then play Zone 2 the other and so on. Dawit played for Zone 3, which he says ranked right around the middle.

Rules weren't exactly rigid. The kids used rocks to mark goals and there was no “out of bounds” — you just played.

“We play soccer and that’s it,” Dawit says.

He chooses his words carefully. He thinks before answering any question. In other words, he’s shy.

Being shy actually helped him learn English in his first full American academic year in 2009 — fifth grade.

“I don’t talk,” Dawit says. “I just stayed quiet and listen to everybody, what they’re saying, try to figure it out.

“I was pretty shy and quiet.”

Ruiz, who's at Dawit's apartment today with her grandson, yells from the hallway — “You still are!”

Dawit laughs. His mouth is shut, but he’s definitely laughing. He folds his hands and rests his arms on black soccer sweats, contrasting with his bright blue Chelsea FC shirt.

Just then a cell phone rings next to him. His little sister — who is pretty dang tall for a 7-year-old — runs into the living room and starts tearing up the sofa’s ocean-blue cushions to find the phone.

It’s Dawit’s. He takes the phone from his sister and shields it from his 4-year-old brother, who dropped his toy car to come see what the fuss was all about.

“I have to take care of them sometimes when my mom goes away,” Dawit says, holding his phone too high for his little brother to steal.

Dawit’s serious about turning soccer into a career. Medals and trophies from soccer and long-distance running at Central High line the mantle right above his living room window. He doesn’t care where he goes to college — anywhere that’ll give him a scholarship.

* Back in the car — 6 a.m. *

Not everyone hitches a ride to practice with Ruiz this Friday morning. Some also get to and from practices and games with Vazquez. He lets them ride in the back of his pickup truck. It reminds them of back home, he says.

It’s 6 in the morning now. Ruiz pulls up next to her husband’s truck at the practice field behind the North Phoenix Baptist Church. Two brothers lean against Vazquez's truck bed, smiling about something.

They’re Michael and Akili. Michael, the elder at 16, stands about 6 inches shorter than Akili, 15, quite tall for his age. It’s hard not to focus on these two. Not just because of their skills — they both play varsity soccer at last year's state runner-up Cortez High.

But something else. Something about the way they play.

* Michael and Akili * 

It’s the following Thursday morning, the morning after the oh-so-important Wednesday game.

Milan didn’t win. Now their club season is in dire straits and they have an off week before a literal must-win the following week, the regular season finale.

But that doesn’t really matter in Michael and Akili’s apartment right now. They just finished watching Portugal vs. Poland in the UEFA European Championship and now they’re relaxing in their living room.

They share a bedroom with two of their younger brothers — four boys spread across three twin beds lined edge to edge, essentially filling the entire room.

There’s a closet, but it’s not really used. Instead clothes hang on hangers pinned to the walls. They hang next to backpacks, lots of medals and a leather cowboy hat coach Vazquez gave to Akili.

“We like to make this right here, because that’s how it is in our country,” Akili says, pointing to the walls. “In our country there’s no like closets. No, you have to take the nails and do like this, so that’s why we decided to make it like this.”

The brothers live with their parents, two uncles, three brothers and three sisters in a three-bedroom apartment. They grew up in a refugee camp in Tanzania. Their parents fled there from the Congo after their own parents, the brothers’ grandparents, were killed.

Michael and Akili, who mostly play midfield or forward, are some of the “freshest” players on the team, having moved to the U.S. in June 2013. So they vividly remember life in the Tanzanian camp.

It was dangerous to stay inside houses, they say. The homes were unstable boxes made of bricks. The “roofs” were layers of grass that sometimes flew away in bad weather and struck people walking around the camp, Michael says. He routinely taps his fingers on the table in front of him to emphasize points.

The brothers first landed in Brussels and France before flying over the Atlantic to New York, Chicago then Phoenix three years ago this summer.

Michael remembers his first time on an elevator, shocked into a static freeze as the big box around him started moving. Akili says everything about the tall, new cities amazed him.

“It was just a whole new picture,” Akili says, clasping his hands together on his lap. Other times he waves his hands in the air to illustrate a point. He talks with his hands as often as Michael taps the table.

“Seeing a lot new things we’d never seen in our lives, just seen them on TV. It was really amazing, like ‘Wow,’” Akili says.

The brothers say they spent whatever time outside school they had in Tanzania playing soccer with friends. Like Dawit, they formed teams based on regions of the camp and created their own little tournaments.

Akili beams when asked where they'd play soccer.

“We could play anywhere,” he replies.

In fact, both brothers beam bright white smiles whenever soccer gets brought up. The sport is practically divine to them. They talk about it with a reverence some save for fine works of art, like the African yellow tapestries draped over the dark brown leather couch they’re sitting on.

“The beautiful game, soccer,” Akili says, shaking his head. “It’s soccer, you make friends. You just feel so good playing it. I don’t know how to describe it, but … ”

“It’s unexplainable,” Michael finishes. Akili nods.

They joined the North Phoenix Christian Soccer Club as soon as they heard about it from refugee friends in 2014. The club doesn't do any advertising online, so most players find out about it through word of mouth.

Players often live in lower-income apartment complexes that house lots of refugees. Kids play soccer together in the parking lots of these complexes all the time, Ruiz says. So if one of them joins the club, it's no surprise word travels quickly.

Michael and Akili live in a complex with many other African refugee families.

The brothers didn’t get to play much with a real soccer ball in Tanzania. Instead, people would blow up a medical latex glove, Michael says, and layer materials around it to make it somewhat playable.

“Some people like, I could say professionally, they could make it look like a real soccer ball,” Akili says. “Like it could be as hard as a soccer ball, but not really.”

All players on Milan at some point or another articulated how much soccer and the team meant to them. But none like these brothers.

“You could say we call ourselves a family, yeah that team, we call ourselves a family,” Akili says. “I wouldn’t call them my best friends, I would call them my family because they mean more than friends to me.

“They don’t just help me in the field, but they help me outside, too. When I have personal problems, they help me outside, too.”

* 'Giving them a purpose' *

Milan won its regular season finale and made the playoffs. They'll wrap up their indoor season this summer then transition back to outdoor soccer when it cools down in the fall. Eventually they'll move up to the 17-and-under division together, still under the name Milan, still under coach Vazquez and still hitching rides with their other "coach" Ruiz.

Ruiz and Vazquez have been second parents to these kids for six years now. It's extremely rewarding and worth the voluntary lack of sleep, Ruiz says after calling to give the playoffs update. She says soccer is much more than just a game for these boys.

“We have a lot of crimes happening throughout our country and I think that a lot of the kids that get involved in bad stuff don't have a purpose or don't find things to do," she says. "This brings unity to them and it brings leisure time, it brings friendship. Sometimes they may not have hope as far as school, sometimes they get disappointed, they get really discouraged with their surroundings occasionally.

"The team is giving them a purpose of something, giving them hope.”