All 50 Uses of
refugee
in
Outcasts United
- The boys at the other end of the field were members of an all-refugee soccer team called the Fugees.†
Chpt Intr.
- I'd shown up knowing little about the team other than that the players were refugees and the coach a woman, and that the team was based in a town called Clarkston.†
Chpt Intr.
- In a little more than a decade, the process of refugee resettlement had transformed Clarkston from a simple southern town into one of the most diverse communities in America.†
Chpt Intr.
- Mention the "refugees of Clarkston" and even many Atlantans will ask first if you're referring to those who had arrived in town from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.†
Chpt Intr.
- I saw a great deal of soccer over the next few months, but the most moving moments for me—and the most instructive and insightful—came not on the sidelines but over hot cups of sugary tea, over meals of stewed cassava or beans and rice, or platters of steaming Afghan mantu, on the sofas and floors of the apartments of refugees in Clarkston.†
Chpt Intr.
- If that goal was scored by a young refugee from Liberia, off an assist from a boy from southern Sudan, who was set up by a player from Burundi or a Kurd from Iraq—on a field in Georgia, U.S.A., no less—understanding its origins would mean following the thread of causation back in time to events that long preceded the first whistle.†
Chpt Intr.
- When I first decided to write about the Fugees, I wasn't sure how, or even if, the story of the remaking of Clarkston and the story of a refugee soccer team there would explicitly overlap.†
Chpt Intr.
- A dispute erupted between the mayor of Clarkston, a retired heating and plumbing contractor named Lee Swaney, and a group of young Sudanese refugees who were playing casual games of soccer on the only general-use field in the town park.†
Chpt Intr.
- As the author Mary Pipher wrote about refugees who had been resettled in Nebraska in her book The Middle of Everywhere, "The refugee experience of dislocation, cultural bereavement, confusion and constant change will soon be all of our experience.†
Chpt Intr.
- As the author Mary Pipher wrote about refugees who had been resettled in Nebraska in her book The Middle of Everywhere, "The refugee experience of dislocation, cultural bereavement, confusion and constant change will soon be all of our experience.†
Chpt Intr.
- Rather, they were assigned to it—the refugees by resettlement officials they never met, the townspeople by a faraway bureaucratic apparatus that decided, almost haphazardly, to put a sampling of people from all over the world in the modest little boat locals thought they had claimed for themselves.†
Chpt Intr.
- The tribal violence that drove Beatrice Ziaty, a Liberian refugee whose sons Jeremiah and Mandela played on the Fugees, from Monrovia to Clarkston grew ultimately from the decision of a group of Americans in the mid-nineteenth century to relocate freed slaves from the United States after emancipation, a process that created a favored and much-resented ruling tribe with little or no organic connection to the nation it ruled.†
Chpt Intr.
- She went to the best school in Amman and lived at a comfortable distance from the problems of that city, including poverty and the tensions brought on by the influx of Palestinian and later Iraqi refugees.†
Chpt 1
- She knew nothing yet about Clarkston, the town just down the road that had been transformed by refugees, people not unlike herself, who had fled certain discontent in one world for uncertain lives in another.†
Chpt 1
- THE ZIATYS' STORY, as well as any, shows the extent to which modern refugees can trace their displacement to the mistakes, greed, fears, crimes, and foibles of men who long preceded them, sometimes by decades—or longer.†
Chpt 2
- More than 100,000 Krahn refugees flooded into Ivory Coast, even as Doe's Krahn soldiers committed atrocities of their own.†
Chpt 2
- But mostly she lumbered through the bush until, after ten days of travel, she arrived at an overflowing refugee camp across the border.†
Chpt 2
- Together and with the help of other refugees, Beatrice and her sons built a mud hut for shelter.†
Chpt 2
- The camp, home to more than twenty thousand refugees from the war in Liberia, was squalid, with frequent food shortages and a quiet threat in the form of soldiers who worked in the camp to recruit young men back into the war.†
Chpt 2
- Against all odds and after countless interviews with UN personnel, Beatrice learned that she and her boys had been accepted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for resettlement.†
Chpt 2
- They were granted a $3,016 loan by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement for four one-way plane tickets to the United States.†
Chpt 2
- Like all refugees accepted into the United States for resettlement, she would have only three months of government assistance to help her get on her feet, to say nothing of the debt she owed on her plane tickets.†
Chpt 2
- "Small Town … Big Heart" Before refugees like Beatrice Ziaty started arriving, Mayor Swaney liked to say, Clarkston, Georgia, was "just a sleepy little town by the railroad tracks."†
Chpt 3
- In the late 1980s, another group of outsiders took note of Clarkston: the nonprofit agencies that resettle the tens of thousands of refugees accepted into the United States each year.†
Chpt 3
- The agencies—which include the International Rescue Committee, the organization founded in 1933 by Albert Einstein to help bring Jewish refugees from Europe to the United States, as well as World Relief, Lutheran Family Services, and others—are contracted by the government to help refugee families settle in to their new lives.†
Chpt 3
- The agencies—which include the International Rescue Committee, the organization founded in 1933 by Albert Einstein to help bring Jewish refugees from Europe to the United States, as well as World Relief, Lutheran Family Services, and others—are contracted by the government to help refugee families settle in to their new lives.†
Chpt 3
- From the perspective of the resettlement agencies, Clarkston, Georgia, was a textbook example of a community ripe for refugee resettlement.†
Chpt 3
- The first refugees arrived in Clarkston in the late 1980s and early 1990s from Southeast Asia—mostly Vietnamese and Cambodians fleeing Communist governments.†
Chpt 3
- So the agencies, encouraged by the success of that early round of resettlement, brought in other refugees—survivors of the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and oppressed minorities from the former Soviet Union.†
Chpt 3
- World Relief and the International Rescue Committee opened offices in Clarkston to better serve the newcomers, and resettled still more refugees—now from war-ravaged African countries including Liberia, Congo, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.†
Chpt 3
- Between 1996 and 2001, more than nineteen thousand refugees were resettled in Georgia, and many of those ended up in or around Clarkston.†
Chpt 3
- The 2000 census revealed that fully one-third of Clarkston's population was foreign-born, though almost everyone suspected the number was higher because census estimates did not account for large numbers of refugees and immigrants living together in Clarkston's apartments.†
Chpt 3
- When he investigated, he found that the singles and nuclear families that had inhabited the town's apartment complexes were being displaced by families of refugees living eight or ten to an apartment—and producing a proportionate amount of garbage, which the town had to haul away.†
Chpt 3
- THE CHANGE IN Clarkston was an accelerated version of demographic changes taking place all across America because of immigration and refugee resettlement.†
Chpt 3
- The shopping center transformed: while Thriftown, the grocery store, remained, restaurants such as Hungry Harry's pizza joint were replaced by Vietnamese and Eritrean restaurants, a Halal butcher, and a "global pharmacy" that catered to the refugee community by selling, among other things, international phone cards.†
Chpt 3
- A group of Bosnian refugees who had come from the town of Bosanski Samac came face-to-face in Clarkston with a Serbian soldier named Nikola Vukovic, who they said had tortured them during the war, beating them bloody in the town police station for days.†
Chpt 3
- Family members blamed the act on the post-traumatic stress the young man suffered after being tortured in a refugee camp, an explanation that hardly soothed the anxieties of older Clarkston residents, given the number of people in their town from just such camps.†
Chpt 3
- A young member of the Lost Boys of Sudan, the 3,800 refugees who resettled in the United States after a twelve-year flight through the desert and scrub of war-ravaged Sudan, died after getting bludgeoned by another Sudanese refugee in a fight over ten dollars.†
Chpt 3
- A young member of the Lost Boys of Sudan, the 3,800 refugees who resettled in the United States after a twelve-year flight through the desert and scrub of war-ravaged Sudan, died after getting bludgeoned by another Sudanese refugee in a fight over ten dollars.†
Chpt 3
- Each of these events fed the perception that the refugees were bringing violent pasts with them to Clarkston, and caused even empathetic locals to worry for their own safety.†
Chpt 3
- In Clarkston, the withdrawal from collective life was matched by growing resentment at the forces and people that had caused the town to change in the first place: the resettlement agencies and the refugees.†
Chpt 3
- "Nobody knew what to do about it, so they just sort of ignored it," Karen Feltz said of the influx of refugees.†
Chpt 3
- THE FIRST SIGNS of trouble surfaced in interactions between the refugees and the Clarkston Police Department in the late 1990s.†
Chpt 3
- The refugees were a constant problem, in Nelson's eyes.†
Chpt 3
- Nelson looked askance at diversity training and opposed offering any "special treatment" for refugees, particularly in the arena of traffic violations.†
Chpt 3
- Writing traffic tickets to refugees became one of Clarkston's more reliable sources of revenue.†
Chpt 3
- It wasn't his fault, he said, if some refugees hadn't learned the rules of the road in the United States.†
Chpt 3
- But the refugees felt singled out.†
Chpt 3
- Eventually, some members of the refugee community became so fed up with what they saw as harassment from Nelson's force that they decided to act.†
Chpt 3
- In 2001, Lee Swaney—a longtime city council member and a self-described champion of "old Clarkston," that is, Clarkston before the refugees—ran for mayor.†
Chpt 3
Definition:
-
(refugee) someone who has fled their homeland to getaway from a dangerous or difficult situation; or related to such people