Albuquerque soccer players and doctors fight AIDS in Africa
From alibi.com
By Joe Gardner Wessely
On a green field behind Lobos Stadium, Tommy Clarke directs his four-man team up the field on a scorching summer day. Lanky young men sweep ahead of him, cutting through defenders, panting in the heat. They lose control of the ball and Tommy calls two players, McBain and Brownie, “Back in! Back in!” on defense. With a pointed kick, Tommy breaks up the offensive drive towards the goal and the other side curses.
This is part of a regular pick-up game that Clarke, a Scottish-born, 32-year-old former player for the now-defunct New Mexico Chiles, plays with his friends. Now a pediatric resident at UNM Hospital, he originally came to Albuquerque after playing pro soccer in Zimbabwe in the early ’90s, where a simple idea came to him: “Looking at this country and how people use guys like Michael Jordan to sell products, the idea came to me that you could use famous people to sell ideas as well.”
Clarke could see that the youth of Zimbabwe were at risk of contracting the HIV pandemic raging through the nation. He could also see that these youths adored his teammates enormously. Finally, he observed that players had nothing productive to do outside of their two hours of training each day. “So the idea of using famous players to sell behavior change and prevent HIV came to me. These guys have time on their hands, they’re famous, it all made sense.”
With that in mind, Clarke founded Grassroot Soccer in Albuquerque, a program which takes soccer stars into Zimbabwean classrooms to teach HIV prevention classes. Grassroot Soccer just completed its pilot program earlier this year in Bulawayo, an impoverished city with about one million residents. They estimate the program reached 1,000 Bulawayan pre-teens over the course of four months.
While studying medicine at UNM, Clarke designed the Grassroot Soccer program as a hypothetical advocacy project, but received enough encouragement from another local pediatrician, Ben Hoffman, to make it a reality. Soon, Clarke recruited a number of New Mexico doctors onto his board of directors and enlisted other former soccer players, including Ethan Zohn, the winning contestant on CBS’s “Survivor: Africa.”
Volunteers gathered grants and other funding support and hired another former New Mexico Chiles player, Kirk Friedrich, as full-time managing director for the program. From there they built an interactive, engaging and “culturally sensitive” four-day curriculum for the program, consisting of games, group discussions and assurances of confidentiality and participation for the students. They went to elders in Zimbabwe, got approval from the Bulawayo City Council and a group of school headmasters, and, within months, were taking players into classrooms and community centers.
Sex-ed and Stigma Reduction
Players show kids how they can make behavior changes in their own lives to prevent the transmission of HIV. They stress proper condom use, abstinence and fidelity (having fewer sexual partners). But beyond the sex-ed basics, the program also tries to break down the silence and stigma that surrounds the disease. Infected people in Zimbabwe, like many victims in the United States when AIDS exploded here in the ’80s, suffer a form of social death long before the disease kills them.
Methembe Ndlovu, program director for Grassroot Soccer, understands just how harsh and capricious the prejudice against HIV-positive people can be. He’s lost an uncle, some very close friends and lived with a teammate as he became sick and died. His teammate was a widely beloved national star, until rumors of his illness began to circulate. Even now, Ndlovu doesn’t want to identify that player publicly because some people would ridicule his surviving relatives.
“Being a soccer player, you get spoiled a little bit,” says Ndlovu, who played for the Albuquerque Geckos and now coaches the Cape Cod Crusaders–a development league team which just won the U.S. championship for the second year in a row. “Everybody always wants to talk to you and everybody wants to be around you. Then, once word starts getting around that you might be sick, suddenly everybody wants to be as far away from you as they can be. It’s very, very disturbing.”
Grassroot Soccer teachers like Ndlovu illustrate this problem to children with a trust game called “My Supporters,” where one student stands stiff in the middle of a circle of other children, lets himself fall, and the others catch him. Next, the kids then talk about who their supporters are–family, clergy and friends. Finally, the teacher has the circle of supporters step away. Will the student let himself fall now? The isolation of that child, the teachers hope, will represent the danger of being lost in a society that devalues its sick individuals.
With over a quarter of the population already infected, the need to stop the growth of infection rates in Zimbabwe is paramount. In southern Africa alone, nearly 30 million people are infected, and in many places there is next to no public health or educational infrastructure to slow the lethal spread of the disease. By choosing to go to Zimbabwe, our local soccer contingent has traveled to the heart of the pandemic where 40 percent of all adults have the virus.
Zimbabwe’s political troubles are well-known, ranging from widespread repression by the ruling Zanu-PF party, international isolation and a brutally botched land redistribution program which has transformed Zimbabwe from “the breadbasket of southern Africa” into the epicenter of Africa’s latest famine. Nevertheless, Clarke has so far managed not to raise the ire of the famously xenophobic federal government by staying away from politics and working with local authorities in Bulawayo–the country’s second-largest city where there’s little love for the ruling party.
While running their pilot program, Grassroot Soccer staffers met some surprising challenges. Gasoline shortages made getting around extremely difficult. Queues for gasoline paralyzed major boulevards, with some lines remaining motionless overnight. Clarke and other staff members also found that certain evangelical Christian organizations were going to schools as well, giving slide show presentations that claimed condoms could not prevent the spread of AIDS, including showing kids falsified images of HIV cells seeping through latex.
“That’s like murder,” mutters Clarke.
In spite of the overwhelming obstacles that confront it, the Grassroot Soccer staff brings the optimism and confidence common to athletes to the program. Clarke glows, saying, “I couldn’t be happier, it’s like a dream come true that it’s actually off the ground and running.” But he’s not satisfied; his dream now is to reach every 11- to 14-year-old in southern Africa by the time the program’s done.
Even though it’s the world’s most popular sport, it’s still hard for people in the U.S. to imagine the frenzy soccer inspires elsewhere. The players Grassroot Soccer brings into schools regularly fill stadiums and grace the daily newspapers. Lucien Starzynski, a UNM graduate and former coach for Albuquerque High’s soccer team, just spent months on the ground in Bulawayo going into schools. He, like Clarke, Ndlovu and other Grassroots Soccer staff members, played on the Bulawayo Highlanders Football Club, one of the country’s biggest pro teams. There he played to cheers of thousands of fans calling out in Ndebele, one of Zimbabwe’s native languages, “Makiwa!” or “Go white guy!”–makiwa being something like the Ndebele equivalent of gringo.
“These are big players we’re working with,” Starzynski explains. If they haven’t played on the national team, the players have been in the national pro leagues, packing stadiums with as many as 40,000 people. “It’s just as if we were in New York City and we took Latrell Sprewell (a former star player for the NBA’s New York Knicks) into a school to give a talk for the day.”
Starzynski says the kids’ eyes grow huge and they become intensely focused and happy when players like Highlanders captain Bekith-embe Ndlovu, nicknamed “Supa” for his super style of play, come onto their campuses. Grassroot Soccer staffers also found that 19-year-old Sithetele Sibanda, a.k.a. “Kwinji 15,” from the women’s national team could connect extraordinarily well with the children.
Will it work?
Doctor Pride Chigwedere says every effort to stem the spread of HIV in Zimbabwe is welcome. He should know. As a junior doctor in Harare Central Hospital in the nation’s capital, it was his job to watch patient after patient die from things as simple as head trauma injuries or surgeries which would not heal.
All he could do was write death certificates and communicate with the surviving relatives.
Today Dr. Chigwedere is a research fellow at the Harvard AIDS Institute in Cambridge, Mass. He appreciates the work of Grassroot Soccer, praising the idea of using soccer celebrities to advance public health. He also values the qualifications of its staff and board of directors, since they are people who are knowledgeable both in medicine and soccer.
“Zimbabwe is embroiled in many other problems–economic, political–that get more attention,” he says. The nation “is labeled as a rogue country and nobody’s going to do any work or any charity in Zimbabwe. So if an organization wants to do some work in Zimbabwe, I welcome it.”
Chigwedere’s only criticism is that prevention alone cannot end the misery of the holocaust. Governments and non-governmental organizations need also to help funnel treatments like antiretroviral drugs into countries where the epidemic is the worst, he says. To comprehensively battle the brutal impact of AIDS in southern Africa (and around the world) public health advocates like Dr. Chigwedere say prevention efforts must be coupled with drug distribution. There must be effective, affordable drugs available to slow down opportunistic infections and alleviate suffering.
With the urging of Secretary of State Colin Powell, President George W. Bush earlier this year pledged billions of dollars to Africa to fight AIDS. However, he also nominated the former head of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co., Randall Tobias, to coordinate the U.S. global AIDS relief effort, which has raised skepticism whether affordable drug distribution will happen any time soon. After all, Tobias’ company was one of several which, in years past, sued the South African government to prevent it from offering cheaper generic AIDS drugs to its people.
A Global Village
Methembe Ndlovu describes how the breakup of traditional communities, a breakup accelerated since Zimbabwe’s independence from Britain in 1980, has exacerbated the problem. “In our culture, values and difficult subjects like sex education are generally done by a relative. For guys, it’s typically your uncle that teaches you the ropes and then for girls it’s typically your aunt. But what’s happened is people have become so dispersed moving from the rural areas to cities, that uncles and aunts are not really very close with their nieces and nephews. So that traditional system falters.”
Grassroot Soccer and innovative programs like it are left to fill the vacuum. Perhaps a handful of soccer players can’t completely fill the void left by those missing villages of aunts and uncles, who previously would have educated the children and thwarted the epidemic. But a soccer player is a great person to kick things off.
“There’s a whole heap of possibilities right now,” says Dr. Clarke, adding that Grassroot Soccer, funds permitting, hopes to connect soccer players with health advocates in Uganda, Botswana, Tanzania and South Africa in the years to come.