Soccer!

On Saturday we were all up early for a soccer tournament at 8am that some of our 11-14’s from our after school programme were playing in to represent the project. This is them in a huddle before the first match (apparently they were praying.)

On Friday we had a practice session on the local Bhekulwandle field and had high hopes as the boys who were playing were from the top teams in the township.

However come the end of our third match on Saturday we had lost each game – we had very disillusioned and miserable boys! As you can see from the team photo

It was sad though that 3 of our 7 team didn’t have football boots, one was playing bare foot, one in flip flops and another guy (our best player) had to borrow the other boys boots which were two sizes too small so crippling him. This is the boys swapping shoes - a regular occurence through the morning.

Thankfully we won our last game of the four which brought much jubilation. Our happy goalie Zamani

We presumed we wouldn’t be in the final but were just glad they had won a game. It turned out though that three of the four teams had drawn on points so we went into a penalty shoot out against the other two teams.
It was all very tense but our goalie 14yr old Zamani was amazing and saved so many goals which left us victorious and on our way to the final on June 11th. We drove home with very happy boys and ecstatic seed of hope staff!

June 11th is the start of the world cup and so we are going to drive a big group of kids to watch the final of the tournament as after the people organising it are showing the South Africa Mexico game on a big screen on the field. This may be the only game our kids get to watch and so we want to give them that chance. The black and Indian community are big into soccer but the whites not so much. However a lot of the blacks can’t afford the price to go and watch the games so this is a lovely thing to do for the Bhekulwandle children.