Tingley's Travels : Grassroot Soccer Camp

The first week of October is a holiday for South African schools. Mo Afrika Borwa (Here in South Africa) the academic year is broken up into 4 terms that follow the calendar year and the break acts as the transition from term 3 to term 4. For education volunteers, it is a welcome break from school but typically CHOP volunteers like myself aren’t tied to schools and don’t necessarily plan according to their schedules. However, I had been wanting to implement a Grassroot Soccer program for a while but just hadn’t been able to find a 10 week period where both myself, my counterparts in the community, and students would be able to meet once a week. Instead, I partnered up with another PCV and each of us held a two-day GRS camp in our communities. It took quite a bit of planning but eventually we made it work and I’m happy to say both camps were a success…sort of. The biggest problem I faced was that I ran the camp on the tribal offices soccer field right in the middle of the community. The American in me felt like it would be a great way to advertise to other kids who hadn’t signed up and then get those kids to participate next time. Well, in reality, it turned out a lot of them just flocked to the camp and participated anyway. In one way this is great: more participants learning about HIV through fun games. Yet the dynamics of the camp change greatly when 5-10 year olds joined the group of 13-15 year olds and ended up getting distracted and messing around when we are having a serious discussion about sex with older partners or domestic violence).

In the end it worked out well and I was happy I had the chance to run the camp. I learned a lot about facilitating with younger audiences and it helped make Steven’s an even bigger success after mine wrapped up!