Finding the World in Loudoun County

On Tuesday, the match at Donegal field got going about 7 p.m.

Branch and Elabderrahmani were there, and the assembly included two players from Ghana. Skaer shook their hands and told them to come again.

When Jean Jupiter showed up, someone yelled, "There's a Haitian in the house!"

Off in the middle of an adjacent field, a woman in pink robes was meditating.

Over by a pond, Satya and Vijaya Parakala took a walk with their son.

There was the sound of hammers and power saws in the Amberlea section, where townhouses had signs on the windows: "Future Home of the _____s."

When he thought about it, Branch said his experience living in South Riding has been surprisingly different from his time in New York. Though he lived in Queens County, one of the most diverse in the nation, his neighborhood was mostly segregated.

"In Rockaway, it went from a very Catholic community to a Jewish neighborhood to a very low-income community that was mixed, Hispanic, black and white," he said, noting that people tended to keep to their own areas. "When I first moved to South Riding, we lived in a townhouse, and my immediate neighbors were from Afghanistan on one side and India on the other, and then there was someone who had just moved from Texas. It was really amazing."

Elabderrahmani, who speaks five languages and has citizenship in three countries -- he became a U.S. citizen last month -- said he, too, has been pleasantly surprised by the increasingly international character of the development off Route 50. He said he feels at home there.

"I grew up in a mixed environment," he said. "My dad is Muslim, my mom was Catholic. So I will definitely not feel comfortable if I lived in a place with one background."

South Riding is 10 years old, although newer phases of the development are being built. The population of those phases tends to be more diverse than South Riding as a whole, though hardly as diverse as the soccer field.

The development, which has its own Zip code, was about 87 percent white in 2000, about 84 percent white in 2004 and is projected to be about 82 percent white in 2009, according to county data. Last year, 7 percent of residents were of Hispanic origin, 5.5 percent were Asian, 5.4 percent African American, 2.6 percent "two races or more" and 2 percent "other."