TIM PEELER: Cisse Finds New Home, Hope

BY TIM PEELER

 

RALEIGH, N.C. Seven years ago, NC State soccer player El Hadj Cisse left his native Ivory Coast as a mere 14-year-old child. He returned for the first time last December as an adult.

He wasn’t an average boy no one who lived through his final days in the civil war-torn Western African nation would be completely normal again. He left school one spring day with his best friend, Amadou Sylia, only to find themselves and dozens of their classmates, caught in the cross-fire between rebel and government forces. More than half the students that went to his school that day were killed or injured in the skirmish. Cisse was with Amadou as he died of a gunshot wound beside him.

The childhood Cisse and Sylia spent playing soccer in the streets of Abidjan, something they did every day in Ivory Coast’s capital city, was over. Their dreams of playing professional soccer in Europe were shattered. Cisse’s future was in doubt.

“My dad [Vakaba Cisse] is a great believer in school,” Cisse says. “He told me I want you to go somewhere else. Don’t get caught up in all of the emotions of this. Don’t give up.’ I didn’t want to just sit at home and relive this story over and over.”

His parents found a way for him to leave the Ivory Coast, to seek better opportunities than what he faced in his native country. They sent him scared, uncertain and barely able to speak English to New York to live with his uncle, Bangaly Cisse. Little did El Hadj know that his father’s brother would be more interested in getting his nephew a job so he could pay rent rather than a spot on a club soccer team. The teenager barely had time to play a few pick-up games on an unkempt field in the dirtiest part of Central Park.

Life in New York was nearly as hard as life in Abidjan, particularly after the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Cisse was a Muslim teenager in a city torn by pain and grief from the terrorist attacks. He often found himself a target of those emotions. “I was basically a prisoner in a big city,” Cisse said. “I couldn’t do anything without suffering from some stereotype because I had a Muslim name. The new life I had wasn’t all that great.”

Cisse escaped his uncertain prospects, not by force but by outreach. He found help through Communities in Schools, New York, a non-profit organization that is part of the nation’s largest stay-in-school network. CISNY helped Cisse move from public Martin Luther King High School to private Lasalle Academy, where he was able to thrive as a student. Fluent in four languages, Cisse initially had trouble in school because he was not as comfortable with English as he was with French or the two native African languages he spoke at home.

Cisse also moved out of his uncle’s home and into the home of foster parents Dr. Roy Blash and Bakairi Sadiat. He thrived in his new environments.

News from Ivory Coast was spotty at best, and always unsettling. The one-time French colony had gone from being Africa’s most stable democracy and the world’s leading producer of cocoa to a war-torn nation, divided by Muslims in the north and Christians in the south. Using the $5 phone cards he could buy in New York, Cisse was relegated to one short phone call home a month. (Even now, because of his school and soccer commitments, Cisse talks to his family once every few weeks.)

What he heard during the worst of the Ivory Coast’s civil war was not good. At one point, his father, Vakaba, was kidnapped and held for ransom for nearly three weeks by government forces looking for ways to raise money to buy additional arms for the civil war. Cisse’s family was unable to pay the ransom, but Vakaba Cisse gave away his construction business in exchange for his freedom and for the promise of safety for his family, which includes his 11 sons and four daughters. Seven of those children were born in the seven years after El Hadj moved to the United States, siblings he knew only through his parents’ words and a few fuzzy pictures.

Soccer was always Cisse’s refuge, a connection to his past and as a ticket to a brighter future. He played for the varsity teams at Martin Luther King and LaSalle. The Freedoms won national and regional championships, with Cisse as the captain and scoring star. He drew recruiting interest from Michigan, Connecticut and, of course, NC State. He knew almost immediately that he wanted to get away from the big city, and jumped at the opportunity to play for Wolfpack coach George Tarantini.

“On the day I met him, Coach Tarantini told me he would always take better people over better players,” says Cisse, who enters his fourth season as a starter this year having scored 12 goals in 47 career games. “That didn’t register with me until two years later. I asked him what he meant and he said that you always know what a player can do and what he can bring to the table as an athlete. But you don’t always know what kind of person he is. I guess what he liked what he learned about me as a person.”

North Carolina is nothing like the Ivory Coast, but Cisse felt like he was home again as soon as he arrived in Raleigh. His soccer teammates took the place of his 14 siblings. The kindness of a handful of strangers who work the athletics department administration also helped take care of the nurturing Cisse had missed since he left his parents.

“They showed me something I have not seen in my life since I was growing up in the Ivory Coast,” Cisse said. “They became my family.”

Embracing Cisse was easy, of course. The talented player started 14 games as a freshman at defensive midfielder. He was named to the ACC’s All-Rookie team. As a sophomore, he made one of the most dramatic plays in NC State soccer history, scoring a rebound goal with less than one second to play against arch-rival North Carolina, tying the score against the nationally ranked Tar Heels. Last year, he was second on the team in goals (6) and points (14). He begins his senior season on Friday, when the Wolfpack hosts Valparaiso at 2 p.m. at Method Road Soccer Stadium.

Cisse is not always comfortable talking about his past. He doesn’t want to be pitied for all the hardships he has endured. He doesn’t want to stand out from other athletes who have worked hard to earn a scholarship and help their teams. “I don’t want people to look at me differently,” Cisse said. But he also knows he has endured and survived hardships that few people in America could even imagine, particularly the shooting death of his best friend.

“If I went through that, there is nothing that can stop me,” says Cisse. “I survived something I shouldn’t have. I thank God every day for letting me live. Every time I think about it, it makes me struggle about who I am supposed to be. But it has affected me positively. Sometimes, it is hard, because I think about it and cry and become emotional. In the end, though, it has made me stronger.”

Last December, for the first time in seven years, Cisse returned to the Ivory Coast. He kissed the ground when his plane landed. As much as he tried not to show his emotions to his father, he cried when they saw each other for the first time since 2002. “When I went back home, my dad said I sent away a boy and I now have a man,’” Cisse says. His mother, Fanta, who had not seen her son since he left home, spent three straight days in tears. “She made it hard to be in the same room with her for three days because all she did was cry,” Cisse says. But there were no friends to catch up with, no joyous reunions with his former schoolmates. He was a stranger in his hometown. He spent his three-week holiday arranging two soccer tournaments in nearby towns.

Cisse is on track to graduate from NC State with a degree in science technology and a minor in math. He would love the chance to play professional soccer, that long-ago dream he shared with his best friend. But he also has a plan for his life after his playing career ends. He wants to settle in America and help create opportunities for African youth, who are much like the siblings he left behind.

The day after he returned to Abidjan, Cisse took his younger brother to breakfast, so they could become reacquainted. He told his brother of all the hardships he had faced, all the obstacles he had overcome. And he asked the young teenager what he would do if he was alone in a foreign country, facing hostile people every day.

“I would ask dad if I could come home,” his brother said honestly.

“Why would you give up?” El Hadj Cisse said. “You have to be strong. You can never give up.”

That’s a slogan, of course, familiar to NC State fans, used eloquently in honor of former Wolfpack basketball coach Jim Valvano and the V Foundation for Cancer Research. But Cisse is not familiar with the late coach’s catchphrase. It’s just the philosophy he used to turn the many hardships of his life into an opportunity for a brighter future.

You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.

North Carolina State University Athletics

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