Jim Mone / AP

A Haitian youth soccer player applauds as he returns to the field after a break in his team's recent match against an Edina, Minn., youth team. The team of 14 and 15-year-old Haitian players was brought to Minnesota with money raised by a foundation and the L.A. Galaxy soccer club to play in the largest youth tournament in the United States.

After the earthquake, the boys recalled eating maybe once a day, rice and beans at L'Athletique d'Haiti, a sports program based in Port-au-Prince aimed at getting children from the poorest areas of town off the streets. Here, they got pizza, spaghetti, hot dogs and Pop Tarts, major food groups for most American teenage boys.

"It's unbelievable how much they eat and what they eat," said John Schinnick, a local youth soccer coach and host. "They'll grab eight slices of bread and pile it up. Pizza, bread on that and rice on that and ketchup over everything."

Eventually, Schinnick said, "they laid off piling it so high because they realized it was going to keep coming. They could eat four or five times a day if they wanted."

Remarkably, or perhaps frighteningly, life in Haiti seems back to "normal" for one many of the 14-year-olds who have grown up in one of the world's poorest nations.

"It wasn't too hard," goalkeeper Anel Pierre Jr. said of putting the earthquake behind him. "I tried to find a way to take the stress out and soccer was one of the ways to do that."

L'Athletique d'Haiti has received help from the Galaxy, the Sanneh Foundation and other organizations to outfit more than 600 kids with soccer equipment and give them something to fill their day, and a meal to fill their stomachs.

"That's one of the things we wanted, to start playing again right away," Pereira said. "When you're playing, you concentrate on the game, you don't concentrate on the problems necessarily.

"It helped the kids refocus again. It was their routine. It helped them go back to what they were used to, which is an important thing."

Now that the tournament is over, the kids will spend the rest of their time here at lake beaches and an amusement park. Pereira said very few are ready to go home even though they have been away from their families for more than two weeks.

In her eyes, that's not a bad thing.

"Socially, it's a very good experience," she said. "They've never traveled. They've never seen what else is around them. It helps them open their vision, their minds, to seeing other things and how life can be different."

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