The sport that unites: Soccer Without Borders makes young newcomers to the USA feel at home

Three pairs of jeans, five T-shirts and a pair of All-Star sneakers. That’s all Yajaira Lilibeth Alvarenga Flores  packed when she moved to Boston from a small town innorthern El Salvador in 2014 when she was 13 years old. Bubbly and eager to talk, Yajaira (pronounced Ja-Hai-Ra) prefers to keep the details to herself. But she does say it was a matter of life anddeath. “They were threatening us,” she says. “If we had stayed, we would’ve gotten killed, for sure.”