played ever since and i can remember so ever since i was i was born you know ever since i can remember i want to be a become a professional soccer player so it's always been a dream and a goal that's motivating me to get right into my do the northwest harvest like food drive near christmas and offer but i sort of food and help pack food and so i do some community or some from the area so you know i have like i said the high school and all that i did a lot of helping feed homeless and you know cleaning up parks and all that so i've been pretty decent but you know it's great commuter says important and we got to help out the the city as much as we can you know find something that motivates you find something that you're excited about that you love to do and  try to chase that dream you know because even if you don't reach it you'll get closer you'll make progress make steps now better yourself as a person so just just work hard keep stay motivated and stay focused on the important things and you'll get to where you need to go  of started playing when i was younger and i was like four five years old my parents you know put me in a youth league when i was younger and all my friends are playing and kind of stuck with it and yet here i am you know i volunteered in you soccer clinics up in san jose and i was playing with earthquakes back home in dallas i work for you know a christian drive c c a you know helping stocking in the kitchen and whatever they need and so yeah who inspired me odd to have seen my parents you know they always kind of told me to keep with it and you know i kind of you know i think actually when i was younger i hope you know a little bit better than you know some other kids and you know i have the backing of my parents and they kind of just you know been supporting me you know for the last twenty years or so coach as  first year and we're currently in first place so we're doing really well right now it's been a developmental squad and we're happy to with the progress of the nature so far this year he's just part of my job is just another beautiful day just being around the players being a former player just i retired you know a few years back so i still have that love for the game in me and i still you know kick around with the fellows every now and then so just being out here every day and work and going to work with the young players helping them develop and helping them become full professionals i think that's that's something i really really love and enjoy about this job hardest part about the job but i think whenever there's a loss maybe it makes you think about again things that you possibly could have done differently during the game maybe substitutions you could have done differently and stuff like that so that that that becomes hard because you always want to make sure the fans leave the stadium happy so thankfully they haven't been to many of those this year so it's been going well and i've really enjoyed you know basically all that all facets of the of the job the management is such that by and that plays an m l s and as a general manager i hire and manage all the techniques have coaches players for the second team and oversee our business operations and as well that's a beautiful day  we get to be outside for like four or five hours a day watch soccer and interact with great people work in the game that you know we all love it's it's an easy job to get excited about well my advice for young players are is a young age soccer is growing so fast so rapidly in this country which is great for the sport and the younger you can start playing you you know you develop the skills you need but also the  passion and that is higher and that's really whether or not you're a soccer player or you know in any other profession you know like you advice would be if you don't have passion for something that it's really really difficult to do so find what you're passionate about truly passionate about and do that whatever it is so i run all of our community outreach efforts so community is a big part of the sounders organization and i've built on these three values courage passion and community and satyrs i see is known for their connection to seattle to the fans and to local organizations and all my role as a director of community outreach is to use the game of soccer  to do good in the community and so through partnerships with organizations like boys and girls club america scores and works of elementary school kids that teaches soccer and  poetry street talk or seattle as an organization that uses soccer to connect with homeless youth to make their improve their lives so a combination of those partnerships and some of our own programs and to provide experiences  o teach the game and improve lives and i think soccer can be an amazing teacher in itself you know getting people playing the game whether it's fitness you know people active player coach relationship and mentor share the values that you learn while playing sports team or leadership and i think it's so growing the game of soccer is important but then also being able to figure out you know where we're moving the needle where are you know where is our organization where can we put our resources you know to make a bigger difference for my role in community outreach we're fortunate here in development working with kids and so makes my job a lot easier presenting options and opportunities for players to do that and you know it's usually a battle about to see who you know who gets to go to running your clinic on that's because our fans are so great really into it and i think what's special about this is that it's really a fair driven organization you know our fans own a certain percentage of the team they're able to make decisions i'm regarding the general manager and how the teams run and it's really it's great because you know the voice of the fans is so powerful hopefully  example and will continue to improve in that way and you know soccer's huge especially in this generation you know people are growing up playing soccer and i think that you know as generations go on it's go become you know the new and i'm so excited to be a part of i hope they have it like soccer i don't know much about it but i i like the uniforms i like the intensity of the game and i like that so many people support it but i know that they have so many fans in this city and they are just like amazing it's fires and you know our fans go in and just the support but me personally i you know i am not very well versed i shall say on the sounders other than i am a fan because they are trying to say what i like about the sounders as i like having another professional team in seattle i like soccer i like that's soccer kind of brings a bunch of cultural pieces and ethnic groups all together for the love of the game you can look at the crowd and you just see all these different people going just bananas over mr goelz and you know or a margolies so it's love soccer for me is just growing up in seattle and watching them and seeing some of the players around the seattle around the seattle area whether it's a high place marker in fremont to just see players walking around and just knowing the from seattle just having that professional team that is less than two minutes from my house all kids need to play a good sport and i think soccer is going to give kids the greatest chance to get their hand eye coordination together definitely a lot of running get their cardio together the team aspect and it's just a good sport with a good culture you know brings families together brings kids bring fifty yeah and i grew up there and for seven years my father was a teacher at met in high school he actually came to ethiopia from the states as a teacher who's african american born and raised in texas and after scuse me after world war two he couldn't find work in the u s and he was very skilled and talented had a college education but there was no work for african american men and so he saw an ad in the paper that said teachers wanted ethiopia and he and his best friend decided that's what they wanted to do so they applied and then moved to ethiopia to teach he met my mother there my mother is ethiopian we came to california and we moved to california because my father sister lived in oakland or she actually lived in berkeley but she had a business in oakland and my father had had a series of heart attacks because that altitude was just too high for him and his heart just couldn't take it and so we had to move back to the states and so we moved to the bay  languages you know and i've always been mystified in this culture in the u s where they think you're only supposed to speak one language i grew up speaking multiple languages as i think most people and then quickly moved to a small suburban community south of oakland and where it was an all white community and there there was no  ethiopian community we actually i ended up going to the greek orthodox church in oakland because there was that's what there was and and they were not immune to their racism either  we were you know the only african family anybody knew there were when my mother when my mother so for us having an ethiopian meal was a huge treat because my mother had to when did you move to seattle i moved to seattle in seventy two seventy two yeah yeah i hear from yeah well if i move turned seventy two my brother and sister in law moved up here i think in seventy nine and then i left in eighty two my mother moved up here in eighty five i think it was and then i came back in ninety eight and i always knew this was going to be home was born and i was two years after me why oh interesting did you ever go back to you know and it just kills me because i now have mountain sickness so i can't i like my father can't handle the high altitude but i've always wanted to go back yeah and you know when we when we came it was you couldn't travel back and forth there were first of all there were no flights you know getting there was a huge huge thing you couldn't even make phone calls i remember when my grandfather died that we found out by telegraph because there born in ethiopia i used to have a birth certificate that was signed by dean rusk secretary of state of the u s at the time unfortunately i got lost let's just leave it at that  i my birth certificate does say that i'm ethiopian born ok yes she's still alive you know my mom passed away in two thousand and six yeah yeah but she was in  yeah she she was really thrilled when when you know finally there was an ethiopian community in seattle by then though she had gotten to an age where she was having a lot of memory problems and a lot of physical or physical problems i know this is long time ago when you were born into a piano so do you remember any experience in school they had experiences like in a classroom or some frames you remember and things like that i actually do i remember a lot of things friend from ethiopia or the smell of eucalyptus just i still it immediately takes me back you know that i i love it's one of the things i liked about living in the bay area that there are a lot of eucalyptus trees and it just immediately my dad and i used to take long drives i think more to give my mother a break the only books that we used to take drives up through the mountains and just that's now my school experience i do remember i had great experiences in school you know so when i was  four i was supposed to be learning how to knit and crochet and tap to do you know needle needle work and i liked that but i really wanted to learn what they were learning it with a five year olds were learning so i would sneak into their classroom and i would learn what they were like and then i'd go back into my big which is the story of how i skipped a grade because i used to sneak in and and and they accommodated me they were you know for a child was hungry for learning and they were going to let that tr body when you go to the class from use welcome harvick most of the time or do you member that i don't remember i think it i think it you know i'm trying to remember because i think the nuns were i think the nuns were english speakers i don't know that they spoke america so i don't i really don't remember so most of the class were in english then i think right i think maybe but i don't really remember of that time ok yeah i was a long time ago then they don't have a bilingual i or somebody like yeah yeah they very hard yeah just trying to get that point but you know it's the one thing i really really regret and i take as much responsibility for it as anyone else that that we didn't keep up our language you know my mom only person who spoke i'm her quince we came to the states she was it and you know she also spoke english and french and multiple other languages so it just became much easier to leave those other languages behind there was a point where she sent me off to greek school to try and revive my greek language skills but i wasn't all that that at all i think i would have been more enthusiastic about learning and her again and then learning greek  i you know and that i i don't practice any of those religions anymore and those are now my chosen religions and  it's kind of been awkward and any other place is i think i've always felt a little awkward or have immigrated from anywhere i tell them to hold on to their language and hold on to their culture because i think i lost a lot by not doing and yeah i just i think because i was so one of the things that one of the by products of moving to the states and i think this is true from many families is and i well it is the disconnection from family that that those connections are really hard to maintain and i was just talking to my cousin so when my mother  died my cousin came to the funeral and it's first time i met her and she's actually she's actually my cousin's daughter ok and and her mother her grandmother and my mother were half sisters and and there's a whole long story there but that was the first time we'd met and we talked briefly a little bit after that but she was going through transitions in terms of moving and stuff but we just had a really long conversation about a week ago about the sense of disconnection from family and how hard it is to maintain that sense of place over twelve thousand miles you know it's just really hard yeah and and for my brother and i we have no connection anymore to my mother's family other than this new connection that we just made the last few years years that this thing  yourself i learned to make to some degree but but it's not my mother is what this is so because because i left the bay area  gosh when i was twenty one i think i stayed his wife learned from my mother and so my sister in law who is this  now at school and i go back to like here i know you wrote a book you know the truth about white people and i just want to know a little bit about that book i think our audience what our audience wants to know about this book would you tell us a little bit about your  first and what is it about i know the titles are full you know well i think you know those of us who live with in who are surrounded by white culture we observe you know where you are she lives among them and she observes them and kind of watches what they do and i feel i feel like that i feel like i've been a cultural anthropologist watching white people for a really long time a lot of times because my skin is such a light color they think i'm one of them and so they behave in ways that they behave when they think there's no and certainly no black person in the room and so i guess i've gotten to see some things and and experienced some things and i just feel like now is the right time i think that in order for racism to be really truly deeply addressed we can't do it without white people addressing it you know racism is not our problem we didn't create it we didn't create the theory of race we haven't applied it tore it to the laws we it is a people of color and it certainly is a black people who've done it it's white people and so at some point somebody has to say you know you all have this myth about yourselves as being superior and it's not true and i have proof and here's what that proof looks like so i just decided i would be at least one of those people who made that declaration that's great i just love that you know that's a good point and i know that you know we all to fight it you know  i did do a launch a book launch back in august and i will be doing a reading on november first sunday afternoon at five thirty at the westside good when did you write this book and yeah this is it just it was just published and i've been working on it for i've been working on it for a long time really but i finally just pulled all the essays together and wonderful but it's available on amazon dot com inc or barnes and noble dot com and lulu dot com it's l u l u dot com ok ok this book should be in schools too i think you know i think so too what about the libraries and i think you have it it is the distribution but the the book distributor does make it available to libraries i have the libraries i haven't had the opportunity yet to start talking to the local library and but i definitely want to do that will be doing that now actually part of my marketing plan is to you know offer it to the different bookstores the independent bookstores as well  am honored and privileged to be here with the multimedia resource and training institute having a wonderful experience of being recorded so i can have the opportunity to talk about the things that are important to me about community they do wonderful work in terms of making opportunities for our young people to learn how to use the digital media and how to use communications skills to really get their work done there's nothing more important than being able to communicate and in our world  digital communication is a mind the most important without it then other people get to tell your story and it's you know it's incumbent on us to tell our own stories before other people try and package him in a way that doesn't make get healthy and make it useful for us so i'm excited and thrilled to have been a part of their  process and to use and i'm really really happy and very honored that they would use their skills and their technology  tell my story and to help me get the word out about the book that i'm writing or the book that i've just published called the truth about white people which is about eliminating racism by really confronting the people who perpetuate it and really dismantling the mythology of what's a period already i hope you will support their work and both by using their services and by financially supporting them