The street kids football business

For those of you who read this blog regularaly, I guess you know the background of the kids I worked with.

The one`s who have lived on the street come from some of the most impoverished and wretched parts of the city and country, where with little other hopes in life, robbery and glue sniffing (the most common drug around here) were regular behaviour.

Here at Casa Alianza we try and provide sustainable alternatives fir the kids, so that they no longer see life on the streets, combined with robbery and drug tacking, as their only option. 

Sports and recreation is one of the main ways we try and do this.  Most days we have various sporting events, and everyday, at around 3.30pm, when the intense heat gets a little bit more manageable, we have a football match.

The trouble is, in the time  I have been working at Casa Alianza, we have "lost" around 30 footballs.  The kids love to play football, but they also are still ingrained with the behaviour patterns based on the way they had to survive on the streets.  A football is an expensive comodity, and can be good way of buying cigareetes, glue, or other stuff they feel the need for.

It is, therefore, a challenge we face.  The kids are clearly in need and wanting sustainable and fun activities, such as sports, away from the lives the lead on the street, but for many of them, the harsheness they faced on the streets is still very much part of them.

We will keep trying to provide activities through sports etc, and I guess can just hope, that for every kid who steals a football to buy glue, two or three other kids are benefitng from the activities.    In the long-term, I think we will eventually "lose" less and less footballs.