IN 2002, WHEN my aunt Abla died of cancer, I used my old magic for pushing down feelings—the ones that grieved my childhood hero, the ones that raged against missing the funeral—and applied that pain in a constructive way: to comfort my grandmother. I called Taytay a couple times a week, hoping to cheer her up even slightly. At first, it seemed normal that Taytay didn’t feel well, a symptom of her immense grief—she had buried her baby—but the doctors thought it was something else. It was my mother who called to tell me Taytay wasn’t just in mourning; she was seriously ill. My left hand washed my right three times, to the wrist and in between the fingers. I stared at the ceiling, marking time as my family moved through the grieving process far away in Jordan.
I knew Taytay’s body would have been buried within twenty-four hours, according to Islamic tradition, her body placed in the ground above my grandfather’s and my aunt Abla’s— When my body began to work again, I felt driven from my apartment, like I needed to go find something. Almost two years later, in the spring of 2004, I was still consumed by that sadness—still trying to make the café work despite a balance sheet always in the red, still single, still wondering if this had all been worth it—as I walked the aisles of the Middle Eastern grocery store I visited every two weeks, shopping for food that might make me feel closer to Taytay. Suddenly, the sweet, soapy smell of wisteria filled the car, and for a moment, I was back in Amman, back at Taytay’s house, the afternoon sun shining through the purple flowers that tapped at the windows.
I pulled into an apartment complex to turn around, and that’s when I saw them—about half a dozen boys, most of them barefoot, passing around a raggedy soccer ball with two rocks set up for a goal. A week later, I would go back to that parking lot to find the boys again, to feel that feeling again, the one I had always felt on a pitch, on a field, on a court. Months and months later, it would become clear to me that those boys needed more than just soccer, and their families needed more than just extracurriculars. What would happen next is that I would found an organization called the Fugees Family, a nonprofit that would serve refugee families in our community.