Learning to dribble around the HIV minefield in S.Africa (Feature)

By Clare Byrne Dec 6, 2009, 3:32 GMT

Khayelitsha, South Africa - Using football to coach children about how to avoid becoming infected with the deadly HIV/AIDS virus is the aim of FIFA's first 2010 legacy project, which formally opened in a township outside Cape Town Saturday.

The Khayelitsha Football for Hope Centre is the first of 20 Football for Hope centres across Africa that FIFA is building or developing to ensure ordinary Africans benefit from hosting the World Cup next year in South Africa, long after the tournament.

'We have said for years there shall be a legacy in Africa when we bring FIFA's World Cup to Africa,' FIFA president Joseph Blatter told around 300 community members, VIPs and media attending the opening of the centre.

New stadiums, airports, buses, hotels and improved roads were not enough, he acknowledged. FIFA had made many promises, Blatter, who championed the idea of bringing the World Cup to Africa, admitted.

'It's the first time what we said - football for hope - is a reality,' he said.

With over 1.2 million residents, Khayelitsha, which is situated in an area of marshland and dunes, where non-white Capetonians were forced to live during apartheid called the Cape Flats, is one of the country's biggest townships.

Most families in Khayelitsha live in shacks that have been cobbled together out of sheets of corrugated iron or wood.

Unemployment is estimated at between 60 and 65 per cent and most residents have lost someone close to them to HIV/AIDS, a disease that afflicts one in nine or 5.7 million South Africans, the highest number in any country in the world.

The Football for Hope centre is run by Grassroot Soccer, an organization that uses football to educate young people about AIDS prevention.

At the launch, Grassroot Soccer got teams of children to race each other in dribbling a football around signs marked with risk factors such as 'multiple partners,' 'unprotected sex' and 'negative peer pressure.'

One sign warned children about sugar daddies and mommies, who give young people monetary favours in return for sex - a practice rife in South Africa, which recently became the world's most unequal society in income terms.

Akona Sibhalala, 13, one of the children who is being put through Grassroots' eight-week skills development programme confided that many of her schoolfriends have a sugar daddy.

Many also drink or smoke or eat dagga (marijuana) muffins or take tik (methamphetamines), she says.

In October Grassroot Soccer came to her school and began holding workshops with the children.

'We talk about HIV and how to stay healthy. We talk, talk, talk about everything,' her friend Athenkosi Mbi, also 13, says enthusiastically.

Mbi's older brother is HIV-positive.

The family supports him to live as a normal life 'and not stay away from us,' the slight teenager says, alluding to the stigma that still shrouds the sexually-transmitted virus - a stigma that can be as deadly as the virus.

Andile Rafeni, one of Grassroot's young local coaches, says he was spurred to get involved in AIDS advocacy after one of his friends was killed, apparently because of his HIV status.

'He was HIV-positive but society didn't accept that he's HIV- positive,' Rafeni, 24, says about the 29-year-old AIDS activist, who was stabbed to death three years ago by a gang.

After kids have been through the course, Rafeni says, he notices a change in them.

'At first, they were really tense, not wanting to talk, not wanting to share (about HIV). Now, they are become really talkative. And they are teaching their parents about HIV.'

The centre, which was built on a piece of wasteland that became infamous for crime and dead bodies, consists of an artificial turf pitch that is floodlit at night, a community centre and a classroom. Voluntary AIDS testing is also provided.