By Judith Stiles
It is hard to imagine a 14-year-old girl feeling comfortable knowing that when she goes to her hometown field to play soccer, after the game is over, she can expect to be given a lot of new information about AIDS, that could very well save her life. What is the connection between H.I.V./AIDS education and soccer?
In the U.S.A. there are programs such as “New York Scores” that link poetry and journalism to playing soccer, where the children hone their writing skills by taking pen to paper after every game.
The Women’s Sports Foundation sponsors the “Go Go Girls” program that mentors girls’ soccer teams, providing education material on health, lifestyle and empowerment issues. Soon, in rural South Africa, in the town of Somkhele, the local soccer field will become a place where girls meet to play soccer, and without too much embarrassment they will be encouraged to stick around after the matches for seminars and quiet discussions about how H.I.V./AIDS impacts their community.
“This facility, run by medical professionals from the Africa Center for Health and Population Studies, will serve as a gathering place for youth between the ages of 9 and 14, and will serve as the home for the first-ever girls football league in the area,” says Kate Stohr from this new program called “Siyathemba,” which is the Zulu word for hope.
Her co-founder, Cameron Sinclair adds, “The pitch will also act as a place to disseminate information on H.I.V./AIDS prevention and treatment and eventually as a service point for mobile healthcare.”
Stohr and Sinclair launched this project through a nonprofit organization called Architecture for Humanity that has an office in Chelsea in New York City, while it’s true worldwide headquarters is on the Web at: ArchitectureforHumanity.org. This organization is hosting an international competition for architects to design the “perfect soccer pitch” where young girls will naturally gather to learn the game, and more important, receive free medical information and treatment mainly for H.I.V. and AIDS.
In this region of Africa, 7-14-year-old girls are a very high-risk group for H.I.V./AIDS because statistically three out of five girls under 18 years old have been raped, according to Stohr. “There is little or no prosecution of rapists, and victims are reluctant to come forward,” she adds. Educating young women about H.I.V./AIDS has been extraordinarily difficult.
Sinclair, an architect educated in England, shares a love of watching and playing soccer with Stohr. They both play recreationally at J.J. Walker Field with a motley crew of men and women who are from a wide range of professional backgrounds — bankers, writers, artists, video-game designers, filmmakers, systems analysts, stock brokers, etc. From playing soccer in the U.S. and England, it became apparent to Sinclair that people naturally gather at fields and recreation spots. While teenage girls in South Africa might be too modest or ashamed to voluntarily attend an AIDS awareness class, if they were gravitating to a sports event, sensitive information could be disseminated without the girls being stigmatized.
MoMA’s Paola Antonelli, industrial designer Yves Behar, and pro soccer player and “Survivor” winner Ethan Zohn join Architecture for Humanity in challenging the world’s designers to develop a soccer facility for young girls in Somkhele, South Africa, within a budget of $5,000 U.S. Entries from designers and architects from all over the world will be judged and narrowed down to 12 honorable mentions and three finalists in October 2004. The winning design will be announced on World AIDS day Dec. 1, 2004, at an exhibition to be held in New York City. All finalists and a number of honorable mentions will also be featured in the March/April 2005 issue of International Design Magazine.
A true guardian angel of this project has been Kevin Carroll of the Red Rubber Ball Foundation, which brought mobile AIDS clinics to this region in South Africa. Carroll has been instrumental in bringing Siyathemba closer to fruition and even helped in distributing soccer balls to partner medical and relief groups around the world, as well as schools in Afghanistan, Axerbaijan, Kosovo, Kenya and South Africa. Hundreds of balls were donated by Nike.
Nurses from the Somkehele health clinics will coach the girls’ teams, and it is the hope that they will be up and running in 2005 on their brand-new pitch. If you visit the Web site for this organization you will see that the banner atop the homepage speaks to the shared philosophy of Kate Stohr and Cameron Sinclair with a unique “inspirational” motto. It reads: “Architecture for Humanity: Design like you give a damn.”
WWW thevillager.com
