I know a lot of you aren’t entirely sure what it is I’m doing down here in Cape Town. Hopefully this entry will illuminate some of that work for you.
On Tuesday Grassroot Soccer held a Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) tournament in the township of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town. The premise of the event is that 14 teams (age 14 – 16) were invited to play in a soccer tournament on Youth Day (a public holiday here in South Africa to commemorate the 1976 student riots in Soweto to protest the education system under Apartheid). The rules of the tournament emphasize fair play and cooperation between the teams. Throughout the day the teams are also encouraged to test for HIV and take part in HIV/AIDS education and awareness activities. This was the first tournament of its kind in Cape Town. We were working in conjunction with a number of other NGOs so it was important everything was taken care of before hand.
We had been planning this event since my arrival at GRS. The weather forecast threatened hard rain and thunder. However, as this is Cape Town and the forecast is never correct, we had a slight shower in the morning followed by sunshine throughout the rest of the day. The shindig went off pretty much as planned. Of the 14 teams, 12 showed up on time; the other two showed up 3 hours late. A tent with a DJ pumped house beats onto the fields. We had lunch for all the teams and volunteers. Members of the local semi-professional soccer team showed up to voice their support. Most importantly though, almost all the kids went forward and got tested for HIV.
The soccer was incredible. Some of these kids had no shoes, no shin guards, and still absolutely dominated. Everyone played with an incredible passion for the sport. You can definitely tell the level of influence soccer has here in Southern Africa.
My role in all of this involved attempting to document and photograph every member of every team, including getting gnarly freeze-frame action shots. In preparing my camera for such a task I accidentally reformatted my memory card and it deleted all my photos…all my photos, including everything from the Netherlands up until now. (Funny thing that Cannon doesn’t include a warning message that what you’re about to do will wipe clean any trace of the last 3 weeks of your life). I know that a lot of times memory cards will create ghost files so I took the camera to the store to have them look at it. Unfortunately it was beyond repair and all I got out of the deal was a newly-formatted SD memory card.
Anyway, because I didn’t want to use my camera for the tournament (in case it was salvageable so I didn’t write over the ghost files) I borrowed a digital SLR (one of those big ones with the telescopic lenses) from Matt, another ND kid in the program. I had a blast using this thing. Maybe I found my calling and I’ll just be a professional photographer. However, as I was snapping away I couldn’t help but notice all the other fancy, high-end cameras in the crowd. I’ll bet the ratio of cameras to players was about 1:1. There were film crews, folks from Nike, the local media, and even a few real professional photographers in the mix. It felt a little overwhelming. I know the coverage is good and it’s important to spread what we’re doing but with so much attention if almost felt a little exploitative. That being said, I saw the video created for a tournament in Lesotho by the same film crew and it was amazing. I’m excited to see what they do with this one.
I learned something new about Africa as well. It seems the more and more you plan for something the less and less that plan will be followed. As soon as we got to the tournament things started going haywire. Teams didn’t show up, we weren’t on schedule, and there could have been better communication among everyone on the ground. The only thing to do was stay fluid and adapt to the situation. That being said, I thought overall the tournament was a huge success. After the long day I was completely exhausted so I devoured a half-chicken with hot peri-peri sauce at Nandos (voted best chicken in the world by ND interns) and got some well-deserved sleep.
On Tuesday Grassroot Soccer held a Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) tournament in the township of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town. The premise of the event is that 14 teams (age 14 – 16) were invited to play in a soccer tournament on Youth Day (a public holiday here in South Africa to commemorate the 1976 student riots in Soweto to protest the education system under Apartheid). The rules of the tournament emphasize fair play and cooperation between the teams. Throughout the day the teams are also encouraged to test for HIV and take part in HIV/AIDS education and awareness activities. This was the first tournament of its kind in Cape Town. We were working in conjunction with a number of other NGOs so it was important everything was taken care of before hand.
We had been planning this event since my arrival at GRS. The weather forecast threatened hard rain and thunder. However, as this is Cape Town and the forecast is never correct, we had a slight shower in the morning followed by sunshine throughout the rest of the day. The shindig went off pretty much as planned. Of the 14 teams, 12 showed up on time; the other two showed up 3 hours late. A tent with a DJ pumped house beats onto the fields. We had lunch for all the teams and volunteers. Members of the local semi-professional soccer team showed up to voice their support. Most importantly though, almost all the kids went forward and got tested for HIV.
The soccer was incredible. Some of these kids had no shoes, no shin guards, and still absolutely dominated. Everyone played with an incredible passion for the sport. You can definitely tell the level of influence soccer has here in Southern Africa.
My role in all of this involved attempting to document and photograph every member of every team, including getting gnarly freeze-frame action shots. In preparing my camera for such a task I accidentally reformatted my memory card and it deleted all my photos…all my photos, including everything from the Netherlands up until now. (Funny thing that Cannon doesn’t include a warning message that what you’re about to do will wipe clean any trace of the last 3 weeks of your life). I know that a lot of times memory cards will create ghost files so I took the camera to the store to have them look at it. Unfortunately it was beyond repair and all I got out of the deal was a newly-formatted SD memory card.
Anyway, because I didn’t want to use my camera for the tournament (in case it was salvageable so I didn’t write over the ghost files) I borrowed a digital SLR (one of those big ones with the telescopic lenses) from Matt, another ND kid in the program. I had a blast using this thing. Maybe I found my calling and I’ll just be a professional photographer. However, as I was snapping away I couldn’t help but notice all the other fancy, high-end cameras in the crowd. I’ll bet the ratio of cameras to players was about 1:1. There were film crews, folks from Nike, the local media, and even a few real professional photographers in the mix. It felt a little overwhelming. I know the coverage is good and it’s important to spread what we’re doing but with so much attention if almost felt a little exploitative. That being said, I saw the video created for a tournament in Lesotho by the same film crew and it was amazing. I’m excited to see what they do with this one.
I learned something new about Africa as well. It seems the more and more you plan for something the less and less that plan will be followed. As soon as we got to the tournament things started going haywire. Teams didn’t show up, we weren’t on schedule, and there could have been better communication among everyone on the ground. The only thing to do was stay fluid and adapt to the situation. That being said, I thought overall the tournament was a huge success. After the long day I was completely exhausted so I devoured a half-chicken with hot peri-peri sauce at Nandos (voted best chicken in the world by ND interns) and got some well-deserved sleep.
hai..am jassy................i love cricket more than that of football.have you enj oyed the 20-20 world cup.isit me at http://beanetizen.blogspot.com
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