Firstly, I’ll indulge in a little bit of southern hemisphere bragging by telling you that I spent the best part of today (let’s say, between the hours of 1:00 and 4:00 PM) strolling through the most gorgeous collection of flowers in the world (or the small part I’ve been to) in a floral dress, a hat, and SPF 70… Thank goodness for the breeze, otherwise I might have been the slightest bit overheated.

But of course, that’s just a highlight of the adventuring that I always aspire to (have the energy for)/do on the weekends.  In truth, I more often slog around my house dreaming of decaf coffee as I attempt to recharge; the pace of my weeks, somewhat inconceivably, continues to accelerate.  

First, a disclaimer:

It’s been quite a while since I last posted.  Actually, it’s been a month and a half but I feel as though I could write a (long) novel strictly based off of the happenings of that time period.  Thus, rather than paint in broad strokes, I’m going to (attempt to) describe my experience of one, week-long event – the single most affirming intervention (or volunteer-related experience of any kind): Skillz Street Holiday, Powerchild Campus, Mfuleni, South Africa.

[For the sad folk who hadn’t the pleasure of reading my glorious previous post…]

girls can plan soccer!

A Brief Blurb on SKILLZ Street: Skillz Street is a gender specific, girls-only program designed to address the specific challenges met by females in the communities in which GRS operates.  Such programs are hugely important in communities such as Khayelitsha (where I work) where gendered power-dynamics, socio-economic inequality, and cultural traditions dramatically disempower women.  These factors, combined with the frighteningly high incidents of violence committed in intimate-partner-relationships, help render women in Khayelitsha up to three times as likely as men to contract HIV.  In addition to providing vital health information that has become the GRS’ token, SKILLZ Street aims to use soccer to empower women more generally.  First, our curriculum shows them they can play (typically they are not offered the opportunity).  

Then, over the course of a 10-week intervention, the curriculum and its incredible coaches encourage women to pursue paths of self-actualization, taking into account their extremely limiting socio-cultural context.

SKILLZ Street Holiday, a brief(er) blurb: While the average SKILLZ Street practice takes approximately 10 weeks (10 hour-and-a-half to two-hour “lessons,“ 1/wk) SKILLZ Street Holiday takes 5 days.  Because SKILLZ Street Holiday runs over the school holidays (hence, the “holiday”), it operates like a day camp.  Girls arrive at 9:30 and leave around 4 PM, we provide breakfast and lunch to all of the participants, and we spend the majority of the day bending over backwards to make sure that the girls are having fun, that they’re having fun while learning something, and that they’re having fun while learning something and living out the far too scarce opportunity to receive recognition for the fabulous females they are… just because.  Thus, in a nutshell, in 5 days of SKILLZ Street Holiday Camp, GRS packs in 10 lessons, a graduation, a day for HIV testing, and lots o’ fun.

Our beloved Skillz Street Holiday at Powerchild Campus, Mfuleni, Oct 1-5

[Mfuleni is a township that neighbors Khayelitsha, home to my very own office, the Football for Hope Center]

SKILLZ Holiday camps are somewhat notorious among GRS staff members for being the most over-crowded, over-stimulating, over-tiring experiences one is likely to face while working with the organization – this, from a community of people who, as a rule, work very, very hard for little to no pay.  Early one morning before Skillz Street Holiday Camp, I popped into the downtown Cape Town office (where all of our management personnel typically reside but not where I am based) to print some consent forms.  It was meant to be simply a stop on my way to fetching coaches from Langa (another neighboring township) and scooting directly off to work.  Anyway, as I stood at a counter and groggily checked my e-mail while waiting for HIV-testing consent forms to print, the “Director of Programs” in South Africa walked past me and (in an alarmingly friendly manner) said: “Hey Leah! How’s it going?”  I do think I stared at him for a few seconds before processing the question, heaving a biggish sigh, and saying something to the effect of: “uh, I’m tired, but it’s going pretty well…” (“tired” was an understatement, but one is careful of sounding complain-ey to the Director of Programs in South Africa).  He chuckled.  Apparently my rhetorical strategy hadn’t been so subtle.  Because he proceeded to say “Yea…”) and tell me a story.  The moral of the story being: in the four years he had been working for Grassroot Soccer, he had “lost his cool” [his words, not mine] only once.  The fateful event occurred while he was directing a Skillz Holiday Camp.  I was “assistant-directing…” Skillz Holiday is not for the faint of heart.

To start with, on the first day my team, which consisted of myself, the camp director, and 6 GRS coaches, was expecting approx. 100 girls by 9:30 AM (when the camp was scheduled to start).  Thus, by 11:00AM, with only 35 girls, we were frantic.  But, to our camp director’s credit (and in true GRS form) we fashioned up a new plan pretty darn quick.  It involved: 1) running over to a nearby high school that we hadn’t recruited (because they weren’t yet on holiday) 2) persuading those girls to walk over to our camp after they finished writing their morning exams.  3) [the most inspired incentive] offering free rides from the school to the camp (which were four blocks apart) by a pet mlungu (me).  4)  Keeping the 35 girls who had showed up at 9:30 entertained with soccer games and warm-ups for two and a half hours until the “new girls” could show up, register, have breakfast, and caaaalm down.  **mulungu is Xhosa for “white girl.”  Think gringa in South Africa.**

So I had the pleasure of driving back and forth between Manzomthombo (the school) and Powerchild Campus approximately 10 times (did I mention it was four blocks away?), shuttling at least 15 girls each time (my car has 7 seatbelts).  In fact, I did that for all 5 days (precedent is a powerful thing).  But do you know? We graduated 95 girls.  That’s a good many more than 35… at least… 60 more!

Brief Reflection: My first real clue into the awesome potential of SKILLZ Street Holiday didn’t present itself in opening circle (the song and dance battle/routine that I described from last time – shame on you who have no idea what I’m referring to… scroll up and read my last blog post).  Rather, my first real clue didn’t arrive until Tuesday, the second day of the camp, when after what had seemed to me like a first day of absolute madness, 95 girls came strutting back.  They came back after spending 3-4 hours of Monday in lessons (we call them “practices but they are lessons – lessons carefully contrived to be fun and interactive and inspiring, but lessons nonetheless). Lessons! On school holiday! All of them came back.  And they didn’t come just for the free food.  [I know this because we had an anonymous question box at the camp, and I received at least 20 notes in complaint about how cheap we were for only providing two doughnuts, 1 sandwich, 1 bag of cheetos, 1 apple, and 1 cup of juice every day for lunch.]  Which leads me to my next section…

Not just for the free food: insights into SKILLZ Holiday from my perspective –

1. I’ve never seen so much energy in one place in my life.  True, I’ve never directed a camp before.  I’ve never been a camp counselor.  But I have been a kid.  And I’ve been a camper.  And although this time around I was coming at the experience from a very different perspective (and age) I can say with absolute certainty that my camper-peers’ energy at my own summer holiday camps had nothin’ on these girls’.  They were animated when they arrived in the morning. They screamed all day.  And then, as they dragged their feet to leave camp in the afternoon, they were animated then too.  Watching them was like watching an energy geyser.  Except, they didn’t so much throw jets of energy into the air at “regular intervals.”  They threw jets of energy into the air constantly.  When they left (finally) late in the afternoons, the silence and emptiness had become so alien that it felt, actually, eerie.
2. The campers loved each other.  On the first day, the late arrival of 65 girls from Manzomthombo High School led to a palpable social divide; there were the “old girls” (the 9:30 AM girls) and there were the “new girls” (the 11:30AM girls).  The “old girls” stood in a clump and watched “the new girls” come in.  The old girls watched quietly as the “new girls” got their breakfast and started their daily energizers. At that moment, it didn’t seem as if the addition of the 65 “new girls” would constitute the smoothest of transitions.  But unexpectedly (by me), by the middle of the second day, there was one clump.  One, massive, roaring, 95 person clump.  They walked with their arms locked together like a massive blob.  They laughed.  They tormented their coaches (good-humoredly).  In a word, they were delightfully cohesive.
3. The campers loved the GRS coaches.  Actually, they even loved me by extension. [everyone wants a pet mlugu because they make such fools out of themselves... see below]





Me leading some "energizers"...



also known as "the funky chicken"

4. Anyway, on the last day of the camp, the coaches adapted a daily activity where they praise and celebrate camper-girls individually (for a variety of reasons including just being themselves).  The coaches adapted the activity by transferring the role of praise-giver – they let the girls be the praise-givers for each other in a spontaneous moment of brilliance that truly reaffirmed Skillz Street’s attempt to facilitate positive peer communities and personal confidence.  Of course, as brilliant as the idea was, the activity took about 10 times as long as intended.  Once we opened the floor for the girls to praise each other, they simply wouldn’t stop.  Still, to return to my original point (“the campers loved the GRS coaches”) in this activity, the girls created awards of praise for every single one of their coaches (they had not been instructed or encouraged to do this). That, and later in the day they forced the GRS Powerchild team to take about a billion pictures together, give out our phone numbers, and promise that we would both call them and come back to visit.  Leaving was difficult, on both ends.

Not just for the free food: heart-wrenching insights from the girls’ own perspectives:

I’m afraid that if I add too much (any?) exposition, I will detract from the incredible power of these girls’ reflections. So I will quote directly.  But I will say that one thing that became abundantly clear from the discussion that the below excerpts are drawn from is, if nothing else, that SKILLZ Street Holiday made these girls feel appreciated and recognized in ways that were so foreign to them they were both shocked and delighted. And, they were absolutely insistent that we make sure to reach other girls – because (they said) all girls deserve this attention, to be taught that they are beautiful.

** Note on where the below quotations come from: I pulled these quotations comes from a “focus group discussion” that I recorded and took notes on during the last day of the holiday camp.  Because SKILLZ Street is a new curriculum, GRS is running focus group discussions for every round of interventions.  [I had the pleasure of recording, taking notes on, and transcribing the focus group from the last day of holiday camp at Powerchild Campus.] Essentially, a focus group discussion is a structured forum for camp directors to get qualitative feedback from the girls about their experience of Skillz Street.  Ultimately, GRS tries to evaluate the efficacy of its curricula in achieving documented aims by incorporating both quantitative feedback (how many girls graduated, how well they did on their exit-health-education-tests) and qualitative feedback (how they felt about the program).

When asked the first question, “How was the program?” one girl responded:

-       We’re all girls… we’ve never been to a camp like that before.  So when you have to go home it’s like “ahhh – that time has come again!? I want more of getting to know each other and chatting, getting to know ourselves, asking ‘do I know myself now or am I being ignorant?’”

When asked which practices they liked best, one girl responded:

-       that part where we were awarded certificates! I was like ‘Oh wow? I’m actually being recognized for something good?  Something that I did or something that I am?  Somebody actually noticed me for something that I did?’ That was so nice.  I was like: ‘Wow, I’m special.’”

When asked “what did you like about the program?” one girl responded:

-       your presence [the coaches and GRS team] meant a lot to us; as coaches, you appreciate being around us and you recognize or notice us when we are around – that means our participation means a lot to you guys

When asked, “Is there anything GRS should do differently in the future?” (my personal favorite…), girls responded:

-       you shouldn’t pick participants school by school – you should pick girls randomly [from different places] because there are lots of different schools that need Skillz Street and I want them to find the information that we got!

-       We want a sleepover camp! And to see Washington!

-       You guys should have your own place where we could come and see you! Like a center, every day, for everyone!

-       Since we did a girls program for the first time, can we do it for the Grannies as well? I feel like Grannies are not being recognized!  Even if it’s not a camp – something, workshop… some of the Grannies don’t even know how to write their names…

-       We learned a lot from this.  Keep it up in the future. All the best.

In the hopes of maintaining your interest, I’ll leave the quotations at that.  And just in case their wonder and gratitude doesn’t come across, I’ll offer a few words of explanation.  First, the girls loved it. Wholly.  Unabashedly.  They absolutely loved it.  Second, they were so incredibly grateful.  For information about their bodies and their health, yes, but even more so: for the opportunities to appreciate themselves and each other, for the push to believe that they are beautiful, and for the confidence they learned as women, by cultivation and osmosis.  Without specific prompting, these girls literally and verbally affirmed every single aim of Grassroot Soccer Skillz Street: from providing vital health care information, to getting to play soccer, to teaching girls to recognize that they are, can, and will be bad-ass women, strong enough to rule the world…

Skillz Street Divas: 'nuff said.

After all, in the end, “who rules the world? Girlz.”

Love,

Leah

p.s. if you’re inspired, and would like to spread the word and/or donate, please find my information below.  My internship is on a volunteer basis, and it is through your help that I am able to contribute to such an inconceivably worthy project.  The Tuesday after Thanksgiving is “Giving Tuesday” you know… and while that day has passed, my donation box is open ALL YEAR! How fortunate! Because I am only about halfway to my target of $10,000 for the 12 months that I will be here. :-)

***Tax deductible donations! can be made online by visiting:

http://www.grassrootsoccer.org/what-you-can-do/donate/donate-to-an-intern/

OR for the good old-fashioned way, checks can be mailed to:

Grassroot Soccer, PO BOX 712, Norwhich, VT 05055

*Please include a memo on the check that the donation is on behalf of “Leah’s Internship”

p.p.s. if you have any questions or comments of any kind, you can reach me at my e-mail address, lbrown@grassrootsoccer.org. Yes, actually – I would be delighted to hear from you (not least because I might learn that someone has actually seen my blog…)

I'm not sure what the purpose of this game was... but I love this picture.

The End (for now)

Ah the sound of hard rain on sky-lights.  There’s really nothing like it.

If I can reasonably expect the coming year to be anything like my first week with Grassroot Soccer, I can reasonably expect a business (BUSY-NESS) most commonly associated with bees.  Or mayBEES whose nest is on fire (heh).  At any rate, since I left the oh-so-nostalgic heat of my DC home one week ago, there has been so much…. so much…. stuff to tell about. So, so much stuff… just about every dang thing you can think of, actually.  Thus, in recounting my story, I have resolved to start with the last first, lest I never make it to the end.  After all, the end is as good of a beginning as any.

My first week of “work”

The good news, in case anyone was concerned, is that Grassroot Soccer most definitely is a not-for-profit organization.  The office buzzes constantly.  One can positively feel the anxious energy which is almost always channeled towards “making a plan” for some thing or another that (inevitably) was supposed to happen last week.  In accordance, just to keep things interesting (i.e. more frantic than they already would have been) plans absolutely never proceed according to plan.

The other good news is that despite the mania of the endeavor, I actually have a real role to play in it.  To quote one of the directors of the organization (who, incidentally, is quite easily the most beloved single figure in the Cape Town office) “there’s no ways GRS could run without the interns… no ways!”  Indeed, this sentiment has been repeated candidly and frequently since my arrival.  The people whom I would consider the heart and soul of the organization, all seem to think that the interns are the heart and soul of the organization.  That, and, apparently the workhorses of the organization (not to devalue the time spent by real [paid] staff); in a meeting on our first day in the office, our former intern/current trainee introduced us to the all-favored acronym: GTI…. Give It to an Intern.  “It” according to Andrew’s explanation, always seems to be the most time-consuming projects with the smallest budgets.  I think Andrew experienced a slightly troublesome delight at declaring that GTI no longer applied to him but that, rather, he was now free to use it as he would.  But… that’s a story for another day.

Of course, GTI (and every other responsibility) depends upon the fact that interns actually know what’s going on… which is a process that does require some time… which means that despite everyone’s (including mine’s) confidence in the substantive impact I will be able to make with GRS, my role these first few weeks inevitably will be limited. During this first week, for instance, approximately 1/3 of all of my “work” hours translated practically into driving.  Although, upon arrival, I had never logged the practice necessary to render myself a proficient stick-shift-driver, in the last week, I have driven approximately 1000 km.  On the wrong side of the road.  With a standard transmission.  Explanation?  As a “programmes” intern, my job revolves around ensuring that all of the GRS implementation operations that run out of Khayelitsha happen – that they happen properly and roughly according to some (often elusive) plan.  As I just got to site only on Monday, I obviously couldn’t have had anything to do with planning the programs that were actually running that week. Thus, my capacity to facilitate smooth operations was limited to driving coaches around so that they could implement their curricula.

Brief Blurb on Khayelitsha’s Programs:

In total, there are five or six programs that run out of Khayelitsha, each with a different focus.  One program works with pre-school children, one exclusively with high school girls, one program with men between the ages of 19 and 25.  Nonetheless, across the board, locally trained leaders implement all of the curriculi (read: no white people/outsiders of any sort directly implement GRS’ educational programs to the kids). For me (and many others, not just at GRS) this proves crucially legitimating detail… sending a foreigner, especially a white person, into an area that has been systematically denigrated, deprived, and otherwise oppressed explicitly on the basis of race need not be the default model for education. In fact, I think it’s wildly complex to render such a model effective.  I mean… what local Xhosa child is going to pay any attention to my American-English lesson plan??? AS IF.  Just ask any American kid what it was like to sit through sex ed program after sex ed program run by some (always) old married white lady. 

Instead, in GRS educational programs, teachers (whom we call coaches) come from the local community.  Also, they’re pretty young and hip, as some might say… very few coaches over the age of 30.  Moreover, all lessons (which we call practices) are implemented in the local language -- which, by the way, is not English.  In Khayelitsha, it’s Xhosa. 

In sum, I’m not allowed to implement the lessons (le sigh).  But! to keep us sharp, they do let us white girls tag along to practices.  We stick out like a sore thumb, we attract a lot of attention, and for now we just sit in the back of the classroom trying to absorb the lesson via osmosis.  ** disclaimer: eventually (actually, pretty soon) we will be following monitoring and evaluation protocol for these lessons – checking in with the coaches and students on what works, what doesn’t, and what we can do to make GRS programs better; revising the curriculum; providing logistical support, etc…

My first Skillz Street practices (Monday, 20^th of August à Friday, 24^th of August):

Brief SKILLZ Street Blurb: Skillz Street is a gender specific, girls-only program designed to address the specific challenges met by females in the communities where GRS operates.  Gendered power-dynamics, socio-economic inequality, and cultural traditions consistently (and pretty dramatically) disempower women in these communities.  Among other things, the assumed self-evidence of women’s inferior status renders women up to three times as likely to contract HIV.  SKILLZ Street (in addition to providing GRS’ token health information) aims to use soccer to empower women more generally.  First, GRS shows girls that they can play (South African females are not generally offered the opportunity to play soccer).  Then, SKILLZ Street encourages women to recognize their own capacity to self-actualize even within their limited social context.

I returned to Cape Town, in this internship position, particularly invested in the opportunity to work with this program – obviously, both men and women need and deserve access to adequate health information.  But women are at greater risk, by far, and in many contexts have minimal to non-existent tools to protect themselves against HIV.  Needless to say, I was pretty psyched to get to go witness my first SKILLZ Street practices this week.

From my conservative side it’s a cliché, from my Wesleyan(leftist) side it’s subscribing to exoticism and social othering, but from my practical side, it’s a straight up observation: these girls love, LOVE, love to sing, they love to dance, and they would do it all day if anybody would just let them.

Every SKILLZ Street lesson starts with an “energizer” – an activity (a game, a song, a warm-up, call and response, some combination of the aforementioned and the not-mentioned).  In fact, every GRS program starts with a “gizer” of some sort.  During our orientation (which was four days) we probably learned about 25 of them.  But of all three SKILLZ Street lessons I went to in the last week, every single one of them started with a song.  And, by the way, the coach was not the person who chose the song.  Rather, the girls would run out of class at the end of the school day, gather in a clump, and start singing – (clearly, there’s a large collection of songs that every school-child knows, kind of like every American child learns “Mary Had a Little Lamb” except the songs that these girls learn actually have a beat that is a crucial part of the song… all I’m saying is that no song I ever learned as a child had a beat.  Except the ones in Hebrew.  Hooray for Anglo-America’s non-existent musical tradition… NOT).

Anyway, these girls’ enthusiasm for the songs they sing (even though they sang the exact same variety at three different occasions throughout the week) is totally contagious.  They get so into it that they start song-battling each other… no, I’m not joking.  My favorite moment of the last week happened this past Thursday.  I was at a school in Langa, a different township outside of Cape Town, when (as I just described) a group of about 35 SKILLZ Street Girls ran out of class and began (at no prompting by our coaches) their song and dance routine.  The coaches were sitting this part out, because they were waiting for a group of girls from a neighboring school to arrive (read: they were sitting around laughing at how the girls were gizer-ing themselves without any help, without the program at all).  So, this group of 35 girls were all singing (extremely loudly) in the school parking lot when another group of 35 girls came around the corner, lead by 2 SKILLZ Street coaches, singing a different song...

For my (limited) “Western” frame of reference, it was like something out of West Side Story.  One group was in maroon uniforms, the other in navy.  One group was standing and waiting, the other group was (effectively) marching towards the waiters.  As soon as the two caught sight of each other, the maroon’s (who had been waiting in the parking lot screamed, while still singing their song) and started to run towards the navy’s.  The navy group simply proceeded on their march.  Then, when the gap narrowed to approximately half a meter, they faced off.  The competition was obvious and pretty inclusive – they battled for volume, they battled for energy, they battled for coolness.  And they were so, so, so excited about it.  It was undeniable.  It was contagious.  It was awesome.

Simply the fact that this display was (albeit loosely) associated with these girls’ engagement in SKILLZ Street was pretty inspiring and comforting, all at the same time. From my own personal experience, it’s pretty difficult to imagine an after-school educational program that anyone would give a rat’s poop about.  Especially if it’s some sort of health education.  That stuff was a boring drag that everyone that I ever knew or heard of ignored without exception.  You had to be part of it, but you weren’t about to like it.  In fact, if you didn’t demonstrably exhibit your boredom, you were socially ostracized.  No one did health education willingly.  Even raising your hand to answer a question in health ed was a sure plummet to the pit that lies below the bottom rung of the social ladder.  That was my experience.  The difference with these girls was that they had chosen to be a part of SKILLZ Street. Even more astoundingly, the vast majority of them were very, very present.  They actually engaged.  In SKILLZ Street, the unenthusiastic girls were the obvious minority.

True, once the gizers ended and the substantive part of the practices began, general energy level deflated some. Even then, however, general levels of attention and engagement remained alarmingly high.  Coaches’ questions met many answers from across the room at once. Small group discussions actually followed the prompts.  Girls debated vociferously.  It was remarkable, and, (yes) also awesome.

Disclaimer: I don’t know the lessons or the programs or even the organization well enough to say why this model works in a way that none of my own health-ed programs did.  My understanding is also (severely) limited by the odd English word interspersed in practices implemented in Xhosa… hopefully I will have more productive insights into this in the future.

My first trip to site: Football for Hope Center, Khayelitsha, Cape Town

On Friday, the 18^th of August, I first visited my office – the home-base I will operate out of for the coming year.  A legacy of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, the Football for Hope Center in Khayelitsha was funded by FIFA as part of an initiative to link kids to health through soccer.  (see pic below, in all of it's glory)



below: Football for Hope Center's very own soccer pitch (Khayelitsha semi-represented in the background)



below: same soccer pitch, slightly different angle




On my first day, I can’t say that I actually did any “work” in Khayelitsha.  Rather, I busied myself with something akin to “orientation” but far from sterile, or standard, or “professional.” Of course, standard orientations are generally miserable, so this deviation was more than fine with me.  Self-consciousness (one of the many million things that tends to make team-building and ice-breakers so horrid) was totally lacking from my first day at Khayelitsha. (I generalize, of course).  At Khayelitsha, self-conscious awkwardness was minimal, largely due to the fact that everyone embraced their own personal and collective awkwardness.  Most everybody was recklessly unabashed. 

Even though only two GRS interns (myself and my co-intern/partner in crime Jessi) will be working out of Khayelitsha, all ten Cape Town interns visited the Football for Hope Center that day.  Our first introductions to the team there offer a very representative glimpse of the social atmosphere I am trying to relate: as part of our initial introductions, each of us (interns) sat in a circle, interspersed amongst the local staff (normal, thus far).  Then we went around saying names (shocking!) where we were from (DC represent!) and then… yes… the favored aspect of the introduction (in fact, the only reason the local staff sees to do it) – the demonstration of a favorite dance move.

Thus, I learned my first of many crucial social lessons – a lesson that was to be reiterated over and over again over the course of the week: black Africans, every bit as much as (and maybe more than) black Americans, think white people dancing is the most reliably, timelessly, hilarious source of entertainment. In the first place, because they expect that you can’t.  Of course, in a turn of events that delights me, both Jessi and I complicate this standard; Jessi is a dancer, and I myself got (some) rhythm.  At our first SKIILZ Street practice, our coordinator Mphaki literally couldn’t believe that we could actually participate in the gizer (which involved… imagine… A BEAT!!!)  Indeed, she started sputtering when Jessi and I not only carried the beat but moved with it!!! A similarly revealing side note: I was dancing at a bar last night with my sister, and a black African came up to her and said: “is that your sister?” and she said “yes.” And he said: “I love it when I see white people who can dance because it happens so so rarely!”

Yes, if you were to lean overly towards the politically correct side of things (and some of you do) you might find this assumption (that white people can’t dance) offensive.  But political correctedness does not exist in South Africa any more than Kraft macaroni and cheese.  But shamelessness?  We’ve got it in spades. If not in Khayelitsha, then in Grassroot Soccer. If you didn’t have it when you came in, you developed it within a week…  Sink or swim.  Laugh or die.

Wrap-Up

GRS is special.  Yes there are some classic failures in communication and almost everyone that works there is over-stretched.  But everyone who works there also wants to be there, works overtime not to get paid (which they don’t) but because they believe in the GRS model – and it works (**more on how we know this later**)...  The kids GRS works with want to be there. Somehow, finally, someone has thought of a way to use the incredible power of soccer in southern Africa to improve quality of life. Sport for development…. Such a simple idea….. Whodathunkit.

***

I think that’s all for now.  I can’t imagine spending the time to read someone else’s four page blog post so I don’t really expect many of you to make it to here.  If you have… GOOD for you!  Your attention span is better than mine.  And apparently you have time on your hands! Thus, if you have nothing better to do send me an e-mail (relevant or otherwise) at lybrown@wesleyan.edu!  I don’t have internet in my house and was always notoriously bad at communication, but that don’t mean I don’t get your e-mails and delight in them!  It simply means I will struggle to respond within a year [partial joke].

Also, you few with time on your hands, I beseech you: use your time to blab about my project to ANYBODY who might have the slightest interest in sponsoring my internship (which is unpaid, by the way).  Please give them the link to this blog, and my e-mail, and my fundraising materials (which I will attach) and absolutely anything else that you think might be useful.  Parenthetically:

***Tax deductible donations! can be mailed to:

Grassroot Soccer, PO BOX 712, Norwhich, VT 05055

*Please include a memo on the check that the donation is on behalf of “Leah’s Internship”

Or, for online donations, visit: http://www.grassrootsoccer.org/what-you-can-do/donate/donate-to-an-intern/***

Be a go-between, put me in contact with them directly, do absolutely anything you would to facilitate their support! I appreciate all of the help I can get.  I am not, how you say, a complete success with ze advertising/fundraising aspect of zis piece, even zough I depend on donations for food...  And I like food…  and I vould like to continue to eat it…  Tell your friends.

THANK YOU!

For reading.  I hope you found this mildly entertaining.  If you didn’t, do something else with your time!; do you, dude… do you.

Peace and cheese muffins,

Leah

p.s. whatever your reason, check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyplef2Hi6Y&noredirect=1
"When Silas Haggerty went to Zambia in 2006 to see how soccer could change lives, here is what he saw..."

p.p.s. in case you didn't know, this is the kind of view one gets in Cape Town... even from a humble abode.... make a visit!!!

First EVER blog post.... "the prequel"

Yo!

It has take me much longer than I possibly could have anticipated to simply set this page up.  I am not, as you might say, up to speed on the technology situation...

But I will learn! And this (very basic) blog that I have just created will be the platform for me to share what I'm doing with Grassroot Soccer from the time that I arrive in Cape Town in early August.  Here I will post my trials, travails, tasks, torments, thoughts and anything else I can think of that might illustrate the goings on of my every day life as a GRS programmes intern.  I will upload pictures to motivate you to hoard up some money and come for a visit.  I will then proceed to deter you by recounting the horrors that South Africans believe about Americans.  In a word, I will do my best to imagine what it is that you the reader might want to hear about my experience as a GRS intern and then translate whatever that might be into a far more coherent blog post than this....

So, if you are interested, please stay tuned.  Once I actually get to my site, there will be so much more to follow........

Cheers.