The Kids League
Everyone has ability: How football loving youth became national icons in Uganda.
The ‘bodaboda’ or moped driver dodges the incessant Kampala traffic by taking a right up Kololo Hill, one of the city’s most salubrious districts. Past guarded embassies, past high walls, past barbed wire fences, past the neatly mown lawns and garden sprinklers, it is a different world to the one he is talking me to. Reaching Mortuary Roundabout, he speeds past a row of coffin makers which flank Kampala’s main hospital, Mulago. The air returns thick with fumes and the views return to corrugated slum. Kampala, like so many African’s cities, is rife with dichotomy. The poverty is so in your face it is hard to miss while the wealth sticks out like one very sore thumb. But I am not on the lookout for poverty. Instead I’m on the hunt for positivism, and I’ve been told that I’ll get a healthy dose of it by arriving at a soccer pitch on a given Saturday afternoon in Kampala.
Arriving at the ‘pitch’, immediately there is a little hand in mine, guiding me to the main happenings. It belongs to Sophia, one of the local kids who comes to watch the weekly football practice. She is all smiles and giggles; her clothes not more than tatters.
“Welcome Clare, you made it”. I’m greeted by Kenneth Oringo, one of the organisers of the Kampala Kids League event, who along with a 15 strong team of volunteers, runs the weekly soccer training session. There are about 100 kids still waiting to play. Practice that day started at 8.30am, and Kenneth tells me that, had I arrived earlier, there would have been scores more waiting to join in. Apparently there were queues from early morning.
The practice is all part of the Kids League, a Kampala based organisation founded to promote sports and health in Uganda. Since beginning in 1993 over 14,000 children and 3000 volunteers have taken part, not just in football tournaments but basketball and cricket also in over 55 different tournaments across Kampala. The success of the organisation in the capital has given rise to further leagues nationwide, as far as the conflict area of Gulu in the North. Such expansion nationwide has enabled a further 25,000 children to participate.
Kenneth leads me to a large tarpaulin canopy, offering some welcome shade from the excessive noon scorch. Beneath it, one of the organisation’s mobile HIV testing clinics, partitioned off for privacy, is on site to offer advice and guidance to the children who turn up. Sitting also is Trevor Dudley, the founder of the organisation, who is eagerly cheering on. He has much to cheer about.
Back in 1993, as Trevor explained, sports in Uganda was in a dire state. Pitches were being handed over to make way for shopping centres or hotels, and in an effort to increase academic standards, new schools were being built without the provision for sports grounds. Realising the benefits of sport in his own education, Trevor saw the need to promote a balanced education, “I realised how much I learned on the sports field that I never learned in the classroom”. And so emerged the idea for the leagues.
But for Trevor the leagues are about more than just sport. They create an opportunity to bring children from different social and cultural groups together who otherwise would not mix. Street children play alongside children from the wealthier neighbourhood, tribe play with tribe and religion with religion.
As we continued to chat, with Sophia still at my side and fascinated with my camera, the blue team warm up. Football boots are exchanged between those coming off the pitch and those going on. As I watch, Trevor motions with a nod to a young boy, Wilson, sitting on a bench. “Notice anything special about this boy?” I glance up and down, observing Wilson, who like all the others seems engrossed in the game. “Not particularly”, I add. “Well, look down: no feet. Wilson is one of our best goalies”. Sure enough, Wilson had two stumps for feet. “We want to show that everyone has ability. We want to encourage all people to participate”.
Actively promoting the participation of people with disabilities in sport is a key priority for the Kids League over the next few years. Disability remains a huge taboo in the country, nowhere more so than on the sports field, which is why already having role models like Wilson is such a bonus. So too is having soccer teams from the organisation participate in international youth tournaments. Since 2002 they have won 15 European tournaments, including the Gothia Youth World Cup five times. Now national icons in Uganda, the local papers joke that the Kids League team would be stiff competition for their national squad. Some feat for kids training on pitches resembling small craters.
As the afternoon rolled on, I watched team after team participate. That was, in between intermittent match pauses for local residents, as they wheeled bicycles laden with large yellow jerry cans diagonally across the pitch - an obvious if somewhat inconvenient shortcut to the local water pump.
Just as I was about to leave, a domestic argument between a husband and wife bubbled over into a game. Shouts were hurled, fists were thrown, and the kids gathered round to watch. Stepping away from the crowd, as Sophia darted home under a corrugated roof, I wondered what prospects were in store for her. I hoped too that she would come back next week, if not to participate, then at least to water from a weekly oasis of hope, in an otherwise uncertain future.
With thanks to the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund and Connect World for their generous support for this project.
Words and Images by Clare Mulvany
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