Refugee Soccer Program | Westword

Like a lot of newcomers, Jason Hicks was a bit flummoxed by his first visit to the Shadow Tree apartments last year. The complex, just a short stroll off East Colfax in Aurora, is home to a growing number of refugee families, relocated from places like Nepal and Burma and Somalia. It’s a population that remains largely invisible to most metro-area residents, a cluster of otherness separated from the larger community by barriers of language and culture and the thick walls of I-225, which runs like a concrete curtain right across the street.

Hicks, a 33-year-old electrician and former PE teacher, had come to Shadow Tree to check out a program he’d heard about through his church; volunteers had been scrounging bicycles for the refugee kids and showing up regularly at the apartments to repair them. Hicks thought that sounded cool. But when he first entered the Shadow Tree complex, he felt like he was crossing an international border.

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Children roamed an interior courtyard, playing and crying out to each other in a hodgepodge of tongues. A few women clad in saris or hijabs looked on from the tiers above. Weird music drifted from the doorways of the apartments, and exotic cooking smells, too; one family, Hicks soon learned, had recently been reprimanded for slaughtering a goat in their bathroom and drying the meat on the shower curtains.

Hearing an eruption of shouts and cheers, Hicks followed the sounds to the back of the complex, where he found a soccer game in progress — a kind of soccer game, anyway. The field was a cramped, dusty square of the parking lot, baking in the July sun, where dirt had been compacted on top of asphalt. An anthill-sized mound in one corner tripped players up repeatedly, and the lot abutted a fence topped with barbed wire. The ball was a battered, sagging volleyball. Many of the players — mostly Asian boys between ten and fifteen years of age — wore flip-flops or went barefoot, despite shards of glass scattered in the dirt.

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