Ian Kalis wandered into new teammate Kwasi Ayisi's Washington, D.C. hotel room in late August, as the Blue Devils were in town for a preseason game. Kalis expected to find Ayisi watching television-maybe he would have been napping or talking on the phone.
Instead, Kalis was struck by an overpowering smell. A friend of Ayisi's from the D.C. area had come bearing a gift: a frozen batch of peanut butter stew.
Ayisi is, after all, from Gambia. And in his home country, when the smell of peanut butter stew hits you, you don't cringe. You smile.
Kalis didn't try the African delicacy, but that didn't stop Ayisi from keeping it frozen until last week.
"I miss the African food I used to have," Ayisi said. "I think the food at the Marketplace is horrible-not tasty at all."
For Ayisi, a freshman midfielder who has started three of the Blue Devils' seven games, that African food isn't too far in the past.
Because even though Ayisi is a Bronx resident and sports a 646 phone number, Duke's newest import didn't leave Gambia until the summer of 2007. And at this time last year, Duke head coach John Kerr had never even heard of him.
It is hard to spot Gambia on a map. The country, located on Africa's west coast and surrounded by Senegal and the Atlantic Ocean, is the smallest on the continent. Gambia occupies 4,000 square miles, an area 13 times smaller than the state of North Carolina. The country's official language is English, but many local dialects are spoken. Ayisi's family, which originally hails from Ghana, speaks Wolof, a language offered at Duke.
When Ayisi was young, his mother immigrated to the United States and settled in the Bronx; meanwhile, Ayisi grew up with his father in Kanifing South, a small town on Gambia's western tip. There, he attended a private school run by Gambia's Catholic mission.
Organized soccer, the type millions of American kids participate in every year, was the last thing on his mind-mostly because it was never even an option. Soccer is by far the most popular sport in Gambia, but the country's sporting infrastructure is poor and lacks organization and funding.
Even still, the sport is often seen as a way to escape poverty, much like the way basketball is viewed in America's inner cities.
In Africa, Ayisi said, children have to essentially choose between soccer and academics at a young age; Ayisi's father chose academics for his son.
To hone his skills, Ayisi played mostly on dirt streets with neighborhood pals. Different towns set up games against each other every Saturday and Sunday, but Ayisi attended church on Sundays. To make up for the lost time, he often played during lunch period at school.
"That's what everybody does. It makes sense," Ayisi said of filling his spare time by playing soccer. "Some kids try to play basketball, but what's the point? With soccer, you can have big dreams about it."
One of Ayisi's biggest dreams was joining his mother in her adopted country. Like many immigrants with families, Ayisi's mother had come to the United States on her own to try get her son's paperwork through the bureaucratic system more quickly and more smoothly. Unfortunately for the Ayisis, that didn't quite work out as hoped.
Kwasi Ayisi's paperwork was first filed with the American government in 1995. He didn't receive his visa until 2007.
Upon moving to the Bronx, Ayisi enrolled at DeWitt Clinton High School, an institution with no real soccer tradition that is best known for being across the street from the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. As a senior-in his first year of organized soccer-Ayisi led his squad to an 11-1-1 record and a berth in the state quarterfinals.
That season, Ayisi met then-Truman High School head coach Marcus DiBernardo.
It was a meeting that changed the trajectory of his soccer career.
"I was coaching [Truman] and I didn't think [Clinton] ever had a real strong team, but then here comes Kwasi-he scores two goals on us and is one of the best players I had seen in a long time," DiBernardo said. "I was like, 'Where did this kid come from?'"
DiBernardo, now the head coach at Monroe College, had recently founded a club team called FC Harlem. The club was made up of about 60 high schoolers from all over New York City, and DiBernardo invited Ayisi to try out for the team soon after that initial meeting.
FC Harlem is vastly different from wealthy national clubs like Boca Juniors or the Dallas Texans, which fellow freshman Kalis played for in high school. Those clubs often place players into Olympic Development Program teams and age-group national squads, giving those players exposure at a young age. Kalis, for example, trained at the well-known IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., and committed to Duke midway through his junior year in high school.
FC Harlem, meanwhile, was only able to travel to places like Rochester and Connecticut for tournaments. But at home, the club lacked even a full-sized field for practice.
That didn't stop Ayisi from sticking with the club. And his role on FC Harlem would eventually lead him to a spot on the Duke roster.
John Kerr did not initiate contact with Ayisi, nor did he ask him if he was interested in playing for Duke, as he does with normal recruits.
Instead, DiBernardo called Kerr. Repeatedly.
"I literally harassed John Kerr on the phone for months, saying, 'Listen, John, I've got a player for you, and you've got to look at this kid,'" DiBernardo said.
Ayisi also did his part to attract Kerr's attention.
"I was calling him all the time.... And [Kerr] asked me to send a video, which I didn't have because we didn't really play games," Ayisi said.
Eventually, all the phone calls paid off. Kerr asked former Duke star Ali Curtis to check out Ayisi at practice, and the 1999 Hermann Trophy winner was impressed enough to suggest Kerr make the trip to see Ayisi himself.
And so as part of a trip to New Jersey to look at freshman forward Kyle Bethel, Kerr and assistant coach Michael Brady attended an FC Harlem practice at Van Cortlandt Park in the heart of the Bronx.
"This team was made up of Europeans, Africans and no Americans. The coach and assistant coach were American, but everybody else was foreign," Kerr said. "There was no actual practice field-they just kind of found a spot and put down a bunch of cones and held a practice session."
To add to the surreal scene, DiBernardo said he found Kerr and Brady lost near a swimming pool by a train station near the park. Regardless, Kerr was impressed with the way Ayisi played the game, in terms of both technical skill and on-field attitude.
"What really excited us about Kwasi was that he was playing the game with a huge smile on his face the whole time we were watching," Kerr said. "Obviously he's very talented, and Coach Brady and I looked at each other and said, 'We'll have us some of that.'"
The recruiting process smoothed considerably thereafter. Ayisi had offers to play at less prestigious colleges, but he had already been admitted to Duke on academic merit, and he said he would have matriculated here with or without a spot on the team.
Nonetheless, Kerr gave him one, and Ayisi has appeared in five of seven games since the season kicked off in August.
Now that Ayisi is here in Durham, he is, by all accounts, adjusting well on and off the field.
In playing terms, Kerr said Ayisi has many attributes, not least of which is his strength on the ball. On the negative side, Ayisi is best as a center midfielder, which happens to be the Blue Devils' strongest point. Still, Kerr has been nothing but pleased with his new player's development.
"We knew it was going to be a little bit of a challenge for him to come into a more structured group of players and get used to that," Kerr said. "He's done a great job coming to terms with the demands of being a student-athlete at a high-level Division-I school."
As for the responsibility of living alone, Kalis said he, Ayisi and the team's other freshmen are still getting into occasional trouble with their coaches. But despite the stark differences between Duke and the Bronx-let alone Gambia-his transition has been easy.
"For me it is a totally different experience, this kind of lifestyle," Ayisi said. "The people that are around me-I'm used to Africans, Hispanics, Jamaicans and all those kind of people, but it's been good."
And for the Gambian-born son of Ghanaian parents who played one season of soccer for a club in the Bronx with no field, why wouldn't it be?
A new land sits at Kwasi Ayisi's fingertips-really, at his feet-even if no one will serve him peanut butter stew at the Marketplace.
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