So I am headed back to Capetown on the 9th of September. Apparently, Namibia has tightened the way that they do VISA’s and they will not allow me to apply for a VISA while I am in the country. So I will be going back and applying through the Namibian Office in Cape Town. Other than that things have been going really well.

A couple of facts about my life in Namibia; the housing here is a lot more expensive then the housing in South Africa, the taxi drivers honk at you every time they drive by you - I get honked at about 100 times a day, I am still getting use to people driving on the opposite side of the road – it is tough to have to cross the street and look the opposite way that you have your whole life, the sun comes up at 6:30 am bright and goes down about 6 pm and is dark- I go to bed early and get up even earlier, it is the desert- so I am literally dirty as soon as I leave the hotel- I don’t even like to wear flip-flops because of how dirty my feet are – and I have watched some of the most bizarre movies/tv shows over the last couple of days.

But the work that I am doing here will be amazing. I am going to be pilot testing a curriculum for HIV/AIDS education for individuals with mental/physical disabilities through soccer. For every disabled person “Athlete” we have one youth partner the same age partnered together. This helps to build relationships, teach apathy, and reinforce the messages by one on one discussions.

Here are some of the pictures from the first pilot test that we did. I have done two. The first session we did a game called my supporters. One kid stands in the middle of the center of a circle and leans against the outer people in the circle. Here we teach the kids about what a good supporter is and how good supporters never make a person uncomfortable by the way they are touched. The disabled population is one of the most sexually abused and we are trying to teach them that people who are really your supporters would not harm you in that way. It is a very sad reality.

The next game we played was pressure limbo. In this game the word “SEX” is written on the limbo stick. At the age of 10 the stick is high and it is easy to avoid the pressure in contradiction to when you are 21 and the limbo stick is very low, only 1/3 of the kids could get under. This is a good visual way to show how the pressure of having sex increases as you grow older. Lets just say it sparked some interesting conversation.

The second time I ran the training session by myself, I had so much fun! We played fact/non-sense and risk field. In fact/nonsense I was amazed at how many of the athletes knew the answers to the questions, especially that they all knew a location where one could get tested for HIV. Risk-field is a really neat game. It is where you set up cones and the kids have to dribble a soccer ball through the cones. There are three rounds of a relay game. If you touch a cone, then you have to stop and do a “star jump”. The second round if you touch a cone your whole team has to do “star jumps”, then the third round all teams have to do “jumps”.

This is an amazing way to teach risky behaviors.
In this game the cones represent having unprotected sex and it shows how that action does not just affect the person that participates in the activity, but how it can affect your family (when your whole team does star jumps), or a whole community (when everyone does star jumps). It is the neatest way to teach this lesson; it was awesome to watch the athletes and their youth partners see how participating in risky behaviors does not just affect them, but their supporters and their whole community.

Aside, from this I have been working in the Special Olympics office. I compiled a 3 year budget for the new Football For Hope Centre. It is just a rough draft, but it is a huge excel file. I will be doing a lot of fundraising and getting the programs running. That is just for one of the partners. We are running a Training of Coaches session in two weeks with another partner. So I am really busy and if you know me well I am loving it.

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So I wasn’t the best about updating while in Cape Town, because I was so busy so I am going to back blog this. The training we went to was awesome. It really gave me a lot more information about the programs that GRS participates in and how the organizations work.
In Cape Town, there is a large Township outside of the city that houses anywhere from 400,000- 1 million people. We took a tour of the township and I wanted to share a few photos with you.
This experience literally broke my heart. You hear the term that we are “spoiled Americans” but you really don’t know until you visit a place like this where people live in tin houses lined up, share a bathroom with over 100 people, have to fight for daily survival, and the HIV rates are increasing like crazy. From the training about the culture, there are so many more issues at play here then just unprotected sex, but there are some major stigmas and problems with gender roles that it is hard to just scratch the surface of the problems.

However, there is a sense of community here that people become so accustom to that they are very satisfied. It is very amazing to me how grateful some people are for so little. I felt like a jerk because the day before we went to the township I had paid the hotel to do my laundry and it came back soaked. I had to wear others sweatshirts cause mine were still wet. Then you go to a place like this where people don’t have washing machines and they hang their laundry out everyday, at that point I felt like a “spoiled American” and I deserved the title.
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That same day we had a byre at the turf field that was created in memory of a male soccer player from (a school I can’t remember at this point) who died suddenly one day. It is a turf field that we were able to play a tournament at. It really was a day full of different emotions.

The picture to ther right is where the kids use to play and the picture below is the new field. The new turf field where they have recess, SKILLZ tournaments, VCT- a voluntary HIV testing tournament and many other programs.

As you can tell it is a very good improvement from where they use to play and it creates many opportunities to educate these kids.

Hope all is well, until next time...

Sarah