About this site
I have no credentials.
Just exhaustion. And a domain name.
I’m a teacher. I watch what war does to children — not in the abstract,
but in classrooms, in the children of immigrants, in kids who have family
on both sides of conflicts they didn’t start and can’t end.
Nations. One tournament.
Years of one experiment.
Summer to remember.
I built this site because I am tired. I think you are too.
Tired of watching wars unfold on our phones — wars decided by a small number of people
at the top, paid for in blood by a large number of people at the bottom. Tired of the way
the news makes it feel like the whole world is defined by its worst moments.
Tired of feeling like there’s nothing to do.
“Wars are started by the few. The suffering belongs to everyone else.”
In the summer of 2026, two things happen at once that have never happened before
and will never happen again. The FIFA World Cup comes to the United States, Canada,
and Mexico — 48 nations competing on the same continent — and America turns 250 years old.
Two and a half centuries ago, a group of people tried to build a country
on the radical idea that ordinary people, from different places, with different beliefs,
could govern themselves together. It was an argument, not a certainty.
It still is. But the arguing is the point.
Soccer — football, to most of the world — is another version of that argument.
It is the one language that every country on earth speaks. And for a few weeks every
four years, people who would otherwise never meet end up next to each other in a stadium,
watching the same thing, feeling the same thing.
I’m not going to pretend that sports fix anything. They don’t.
Fans have rioted. Countries have used tournaments to launder their reputations.
A good game has never stopped a bad government.
But I’ve also seen what happens when people who are supposed to be enemies
find themselves rooting for the same underdog. Something loosens.
Not everything. Not permanently. But something.
That loosening is what I’m after.
“I’m not trying to solve geopolitics. I’m trying to find the moments
where regular people recognize each other.”
This site is a place for those moments. Stories of fans from hostile nations who
ended up sharing a meal. Classrooms that “adopted” a World Cup country and made
a friend across the world. The Iranian-American family watching both sides of a match
with complicated feelings in their chest.
It’s also a guide — to the tournament, to the host cities, to the history of
this strange American experiment that is still, somehow, ongoing.
So: no credentials. No NGO backing. No grant funding.
Just a teacher who is tired of feeling helpless, who bought a domain name
and decided that doing something small and real is better than doing nothing at all.
If you’re tired too — and I think you are — you’re in the right place.
Come in. Stay a while. Tell me your story.
This is your site too.
Have a story about connection across difference? A classroom doing something good?
A moment from a match you’ll never forget? Send it.