Picnics, Games and Culture Shock

The mood softened, however, as Mirabrishami peppered her lightly with questions. Did the family come here often? What did they like about the park? Did they feel safe here?

Such information, the ranger believes, is crucial for police to handle gang activity and other trouble. By the end of the exchange, Pineda and her family were laughing and asking Mirabrishami if she wanted to stay and partake of the abundant spread of chicken, beef stew, rice, pupusas and white tiered cake trimmed in pink roses.

"It shows how much it's changing," Mirabrishami said later.

Challenges remain. In the two years since the surprise Sizdeh Bedar celebration overran Algonkian Regional Park in Sterling, the Northern Virginia park authority has each year managed a more peaceful event -- but at a cost. The tab runs about $5,000 for more than a dozen extra staffers and security to manage traffic, as well as the rental of 20 portable toilets. Officials would like to see someone from the Iranian community step forward to organize the event.

But who?

"I'm kind of clueless on that," said the current park manager, Todd Benson. "Maybe it's like July 4 -- you don't reserve to go to the Mall for fireworks. You just go. I guess it's part of [Sizdeh] Bedar. It's just families showing up. . . . We're trying to learn from the mistakes we've made. We're trying to grow as well and accommodate everyone that wants to come in here."

In Fairfax, the park authority's community connections staff members -- including Berlin, Spanish speaker Ricardo Cabellos-Reyes and Korean-born Wangin Bang -- have started youth swimming classes in the Culmore neighborhood and recruited Asian seniors for other water exercise. They're also working to smooth growing pains at parks, such as Roundtree Park in Falls Church.

Tensions have arisen there because a Bolivian soccer team, which plays games on Sundays, brings in a large crowd of spectators that clog neighborhood streets and draws merchants who illegally sell food, liquor, even rugs, parks employees and neighbors said.

Neighbors say some progress has been made recently because police have been ticketing cars. Cabellos-Reyes has visited the park several times to deter the illegal food vendors, who sell roasted meat and rice in plastic foam containers out of vans.

"There have been parking problems. My dad put a sign out in the middle of the court with a cone that said, 'No Parking for the Park.' . . . It didn't work at all," said Brianna Doxzen, 16, a student at Bishop Ireton High School who lives near the park entrance. "My dad's car was broken into about a month ago, and the assumption was it was somebody from the park. But in the last couple of months it has improved. A couple of years ago, a nice day like today would be awful with the parking and the noise, and it's fine now."

On a recent Sunday, however, some of the food vendors had returned. A man who spoke no English stopped cars entering the parking lot, as if it were closed for a private event.

Javier Villarroel, 32, a mechanical engineer from Alexandria, said the Sunday games are a treasured time to catch up with friends and relatives from his homeland.

"It's a whole day. Everybody comes out, and the whole family really looks forward to it all week," Villarroel said. "It's a game, but at the same time it's a gathering where we all catch up with each other."

The league's leaders are aware of the neighbors' complaints, he said, but they have no power to control the illegal vendors.

"It's the only place we have, really," Villarroel said. "The field, it's poor quality, it's a desert. But we have to play somewhere. We take whatever we can."