Friday, 11 November 2011

Fair home field advantage

Former USA soccer star Lorrie Fair now gets her kicks uplifting rural communities

What does soccer have to do with the provision of water and HIV/AIDS? Everything, according to visiting US women’s football star, Lorrie Fair, who is currently assisting with community projects in the uMkhanyakude District. ‘Mpilonhle is the host organisation and its focus is on using mobile health units to reach communities in need of health services,’ says Fair. ‘Mpilonhle work through schools and provide the pupils with voluntary HIV counselling and testing, preventative care, education, and treatment. ‘Recently, they started an initiative that I am helping implement, called Home Field Advantage. ‘It is funded mainly by the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Programme (CTAOP). ‘Mpilonhle recognised the need for potable water and also saw how powerful sport can be in terms of development, and came up with the idea of a sport and water sustainability project.’ The idea was developed and CTAOP raised most of the funds, with later help from DBSA for the water project and the National Lottery, who funded food gardens.

Clean water
‘Four high schools were chosen based on an assessment of many factors that included how well the school was managed, capacity to take initiative, ability to take responsibility, and performance and cleanliness of the school,’ said Fair. ‘Each school got a borehole to provide the school and surrounding community with a clean water source, a new sports field, an ablution block complete with change rooms and waterless EnviroLoo toilets, a community laundry facility and a food garden. ‘In the bigger picture, Home Field Advantage provides a very spread out community with a place of gathering - a hub of activity.’ On any give Saturday, Mpilonhle's mobile health units can park at any one of the schools and expand the vital health services that was previously reserved for the pupils to a larger community population. The new sport fields in particular, provide a wonderful opportunity to start new school football leagues for girls and boys.

Top coaches
One of the capacity development programmes for these new leagues was the recent KNVB Introductory Coaching Course, where instructors were arranged to give local coaches the tools to prepare their own training sessions, analyse the game, and organise and run tournaments with very little equipment and a lot of players. Heading the group was Eric Whittie, a highly qualified instructor from the Netherlands, who was accompanied by Gramwill ‘Shorty’ Pienaar and Sharon Lombard from the national ‘Stars in Their Eyes’ programme. ‘After the week-long training, 24 coaches were certified last week and the surprise visit by Neil Tovey and the Thanda Royal Zulu coaching team on Thursday -arranged by the Zululand Observer - was a wonderful highlight for the coaches,’ said Fair.’