World Cup Period

The school holiday that has just passed has probably been the busiest we have ever had by far. Having the World Cup in South Africa meant extending these by 2 more weeks which meant more activities for us to fill up the kids’ time and eliminate any form of dullness from their holiday. Of course they had the matches to watch on TV but being there live would obviously be much better! Attending the matches was just one of the activities we had planned for the kids over the holidays. Holiday camps were lined up as well as tournaments for each camp.

The holiday programme was a huge success with a total of more than 600 children attending the four camps that we had. The different locations for the camps were Uitenhage, New Brighton, Zwide and Motherwell. Each camp ran for a week and they all integrated sport coaching with the life skills programme we have (Youth Development through Football (YDF) Curriculum) which has as its main focus HIV/AIDS awareness and education. On the last day of each camp, a football tournament was held where the kids played against each other and prizes were awarded to the winners. The kids were also awarded certificates for completing the YDF curriculum. With a lot of them using international footballer’s names as their nicknames, the kids had fun getting to know each other and building up team spirit.

With a lot of visitors internationally, the kids really felt the spirit of the global event being hosted in our country and even had the pleasure of meeting one of the Swiss football players, Philippe Senderos. A lot of international media paid us visits to learn more about the World Cup inspired camps and Umzingisi as a whole. It was a great pleasure to show off the work that we do and I can happily say that all the visitors we had were very much impressed with our programmes.

A total of 7 matches hosted in Port Elizabeth were attended by the kids and staff, with more than 120 tickets sponsored to us. We had 22 staff members, 115 kids as well as about 45 volunteers watching the games at the stadium. Going to the matches was an experience much appreciated by everyone, the excitement and atmosphere at the stadiums will be memories to last a lifetime.

The volunteers we had over this period also had the time of their lives as they were very hands-on in organising the camps and obviously the pleasure of experiencing the World Cup was the cherry on top! Umzingisi staff were more than happy to chaperone the kids to the matches and be exposed to this once in a life time opportunity and this was also a way of bringing us together on a more social level.

Our holiday programme was attended by kids from the following locations: Kwa-Langa, Greenfields, Kwa-Nobuhle, Khayelitsha, Rosedale, New Brighton, Missionvale, Zwide, Kwa-Zakhele, Kwa-Dwesi Extension, Joe Slovo, Soweto on Sea, Addo and Motherwell.

We will be welcoming the new volunteers and looking forward to the new school term to see what that will bring. We were able to afford great sporting opportunities to a lot of lives with this holiday programme and we are excited to carry on with the work that we do.

A huge thank you to all the parties involved in making the holiday programme such a success, and a special thank-you for the sponsors of the tickets to the matches.