Webster Jon Widgy streaked down the left sideline, waving his good arm, shouting for the soccer ball to be passed. He was clearly offside by twenty yards, but this referee was not heartless enough to whistle the infraction. We’d never ask for it, but a team with four young lepers already down by a dozen goals caught a break every once in a while.

A twelve goal deficit was still pretty close for us, all things considered.

My own little white ghost -- my little Zonbi -- was pushing the ball up over the smudged chalk at midfield, two tall boys marking her tightly, but I knew they were no match. She stopped the ball with the sole of her right cleat, pulled the ball toward her to draw both players even closer, then flicked the ball forward between both their sets of legs and sprinted around them to receive her own pass.

“Dooble nutmeg!” screamed the delighted mothers of our players who lined the dusty field on the far sideline to cheer on our kids. “She doobled them, yeah, yeah!”

Except for their tattered rag dresses and thick accents, these were the same mothers you’d find anywhere in Ohio or Connecticut screeching at their kids, sometimes swearing at the refs. My Haitian Creole was progressing slowly, so practices were a mix of languages, but soccer was more a game of show than tell, anyway. And in a land accustomed to so much misery -- or mize -- I’d tried to be careful with words. My soccer moms began assigning nicknames during the first day of official practice: Difom, Kakas, Kochma, and Maldyok, which roughly translated to Deformed, Carcas, Nightmare, and Bad Eye.

I made a new rule regarding nicknames.

I suffered my own hurtful nickname early on in this country when first disassembling the pot farm -- which was protected by hundreds of dead bodies -- my daughter and I had taken over as our home. I would hear the word Malveyan -- or Evildoer -- while picking up supplies in Port-au-Prince. But once all the bodies were laid to rest as carefully as someone not terribly familiar with the controls of a front-end loader could manage, curiosity began replacing suspicion.

“Lion is okay,” I told the mothers, who believed nicknames were critical to our sport. “Nicknames should be positive. Like Tig, or Rebel, but, silvouple, nothing about missing or infected body parts.”

Zonbi stuck for my little girl -- whose given name is Tylea -- and I reluctantly became Jeneral to the moms.

The soccer dads were a different matter. The league recently voted to ban all the fathers who hadn’t already been killed in the recent coup d’etat, maybe for the rest of the season, after two had chased a referee off the field and down a narrow street brandishing machetes following a questionable call. It was tough enough to get decent refs without crap like that.

Our moms, though, were great. Their hearts were in the right place, trying to learn the rules of the game and to withhold wild cheering when opposing players got hurt. Getting them to stop bringing rotten fruit and cloudy water for halftime nourishment was another matter. Tylea dribbled past a chasing fullback who was incredibly tall and boney as a skeleton. She did a stepover, faking a move toward the goal, and then dribbled into the penalty area to set up her right foot.

Webster Jon was now at the far post, unmarked because the other team knew he had only one working eye and usually ran the wrong way when someone tried to pass to him; his whole depth perception wrecked by the Hansen’s Disease. The boy’s breathing was wet and raspy because much of his nose was gone. Opposing players didn’t like to cover him for a number of reasons, even though all my lepers had the proper medical slips proving they’d been on Dapsone for at least two weeks and were non-infectious.

“Zonbi, here I am!” He jumped up and down like a spastic pogo stick on his good right leg. Paralyzed small muscles in his left foot had turned his toes into claws, and he couldn’t tie that cleat. He hopped and hopped, his beautiful new uniform I’d bought dancing as if on a string.

Tylea had a plan from the moment she’d stolen the ball deep in our own end. She wasn’t captain just because I was coach; she earned it through her leadership, despite being the tiniest player on our dirt field. Her wonderful skills were from long summers of hard work and her love for the game, easily making up for any lack of muscle and size.

“Now, now, Zonbi girl!” Webster Jon called, and Tylea took one more quick dribble before chipping a crossing pass over the charging goalie. The ball was not struck hard, just an easy, floating pass across the goal mouth. My left wing, Webster Jon, stopped his crazy hopping and tried to get a focus on the ball’s gentle arc toward him, the wide open net was just waiting for an easy header.

The mothers froze. Their cheers stopped as I could almost hear them draw in a deep, collective breath. All of our other players stopped to watch this pass, this floating ball which seemed to be in slow motion, first climbing out of reach of the goalie, then the lunging head of the last fullback. It had a slight backspin as it reached its apex, then began its downward path toward Webster Jon’s grimy forehead. Poor Webster Jon couldn’t safely practice headers because of the all the havoc his condition had wreaked on his face. I wouldn’t allow it. I had to look out for all the players, but some more than others. Webster Jon’s own mom wasn’t here to cheer, having left him as a baby at one of the dozen or so Port-au-Prince orphanages.

But in a world which seemed to be trying its absolute best to run over or drag under an innocent little boy, my Zonbi refused to give up hope. She recognized the opening, the possibility of this fleeting chance for a broken kid which life had already mauled pretty good. At ten years old, I was never sure how strong her empathy for these other children really was. She led her teammates in quiet ways. When it was especially hot, and some were dropping back and about to give up and walk the last lap during practice, she’d drop back, too, say a few things to them, and match their stride. And those strides would be labored, but never slow down to a walk or to a stop. They would always finish the run, and although I don’t think they came out and thanked her, you could tell it was what they meant to say by the look they gave her. It seemed more than enough for her. Those things made her our captain.

Sometimes my little girl was ten, and sometimes she was much older and wiser than her father who’d run away with her to this place. “You are different,” the boys would say to her, touching the incredibly white skin of her forearm as they sat in a group, sipping water in the shade after practice.

“No, not different, you stupid boy,” she’d touch his uniform and hers at the same time. “We’re the same team. We’re the same.” My little Zonbi.

And like nearly all of these children of poverty and war-ravaged Haiti, my little girl came from a broken home. Her heart had been broken in a way which made her sometimes cry inconsolably when it was late at night and she needed her mom.

I did what I could for her, although nothing ever came close to replacing her mom.

But even a man with a lousy singing voice like mine can soften the sharp pain of the world, especially when the words mean something to a little girl who’s had a long, hard day.

“Don't worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing gonna be all right…”

When the tears finally stop and she’s fallen asleep in her soft bed here in our new life, I kiss her pale cheek and head to the ebony writing desk in my bedroom to draw up some new plays, trying to figure out how to maybe win a game, or at least make it a little closer. No matter how much you’ve lost, everyone needs to feel there is still hope.

Back under the glaring sun, Webster Jon Widgy moved the wrong way at the last second. The perfectly placed crossing pass missed his dirty forehead by a foot, bounding harmlessly across the endline for a goal kick by the other team.

My moms began to cheer anyway. Tylea and Webster Jon ran back to their positions to defend, to try again. There was still plenty of time on the clock.

Hope was alive and well on our dirt field.