Finding the World in Loudoun County

The second pickup soccer match of the season came on a gray spring Tuesday. It was drizzling and cool, and by 6:30 p.m., a dozen or so men had gotten home from work, changed into shorts and walked from their houses over to a field in their Loudoun County development, a left beyond a glossy red Sheetz gas station and a split rail fence.

As always, Arthur Skaer -- real estate agent, orchestrator, all-around community guy -- came in his Olympic-flag windbreaker and was now yelling, "Antonio! Que pasa ?!" at his neighbor, Antonio Duenas, who is originally from Peru and who passed the ball to Falayi Adu, originally from Nigeria. Eventually, the players included residents who once called Morocco, Colombia, Iran, Cambodia, Somalia, Poland, Austria and Finland home, in addition to places such as Alexandria and Springfield.

When summer came, the assortment of nations expanded as neighbors from China, India, Haiti, Jamaica, Senegal, Spain, Ukraine, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina were drawn to the field where once nothing was, and where about 4,700 brick and vinyl-sided homes now stretch along wide, tree-bordered streets, heralded by the wishful sign at the entrance: "South Riding, Your New Hometown."

The scene, an extreme example of the growing diversity of the region's outermost suburbs, was probably noteworthy to demographers, and maybe surprising to people who imagine the rim counties of Northern Virginia as stultifyingly homogenous places. To the men on the field, though, it simply was what it was.

The matches had been going on for a few years now. Self-conscious jokes about couscous, or gringos, or the Somali army had been told, beers shared, hellos exchanged in the aisles of the Food Lion. Mustafa had become Moose. The novelty of differences had largely worn off, in other words, leaving something more ordinary, perhaps, and yet no less significant to the people who live there.

"Last goal . . . !" someone on the field called. " Uno mas !"

They played three more goals, snapped the ritual postgame photo, shirts and faces sweaty, and left.

Jeff Branch, 32, and Farid Elabderrahmani, 33, grabbed their stuff and walked together down the slope toward Edgewater Drive, past kids leaving baseball practice, parents pushing strollers and headlights gliding into driveways after work.

Soccer, the international sport, and more particularly, Skaer, who organizes the matches by e-mail, were magnets that brought the two men together. But so were market forces, a bit of social engineering and the universal allure of a new house with decent square footage.

Elabderrahmani, who grew up in Morocco and Poland, came to the United States as a graduation present after college and decided to stay. He lived in Arlington first, then Reston and Centreville. On Christmas Eve in 2000, he and his wife, who is Peruvian, visited a friend in South Riding. They liked the clean newness of it, the sense of safety created by the self-contained streets, he recalled, and decided to buy a townhouse.

Branch was an Army kid and grew up all over the world but most recently lived in Rockaway, N.Y. He got a job offer in the area and moved with his wife to South Riding, a few miles southwest of Dulles International Airport, the same year as Elabderrahmani. Their reasons were similar: It was a relatively affordable place that approximated their ideal of what a neighborhood should be.

Having moved to a planned community with fields and parks and sidewalks intended to lure people outdoors, it was not quite accidental that the two men, independent of each other, came upon Skaer's pickup soccer match the way many people did: driving past the field on their way home from work.