Six African teams take part in the first soccer world cup ever to take place in African soil. Throughout the continent people feel proud of hosting this event and try their best to follow it, although often it may not so easy. In Kitgum, a small town in Northern Uganda, there is only one place where people can watch the matches: the hotel Boma. Owned by a minister, his manager installed few years ago a satellite dish and few days ago he placed a screen big enough for everyone to watch, although few can afford the one thousand shillings (about 40 cents of euro) that people have to pay as entrance fee.
Jimmy Okot was one of the few lucky ones who followed the maiden match that pitched South Africa versus Mexico. He came with 24 of his classmates. They all study in NUCBACD, a school for children with disabilities. “Although we have 150 students we could only pay for 25 of them”, says its principal Teddy Ayoo. Most of them are deaf and showed their joy with little noise. Jimmy can shout. He likes soccer and plays often, although his disability is more painful: he has no arms and when he comes to the classroom he has to tense the muscles of his back in order to pick the pencil using his two stumps. Five years ago rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) chopped off his arms at the elbows with machetes. Known by their extraordinary cruelty, after two decades of war they ravaged the whole of Northern Uganda, that sank in abject poverty. At the end of 2006 they moved to the neighboring jungles of the Democratic of Congo and to the Central African Republic, where they continue their campaign of terror supported by the Khartoum regime.
Although people in Northern Uganda live now free from violence, the legacy of trauma is present in the depression many of their inhabitants suffer from. Jimmy is NUCBACD’s only mutilated child, but many of his classmates have suffered from other traumatic experiences that leave less visible scars, particularly abduction at the hands of the rebels, who for many years used thousands of children as combatants, porters or sexual slaves.
A one-to-one draw is not a great result, but at the end of the match the nearly one hundred spectators leave the hotel compound exulting and make calculations about the next matches with African teams and whether the size of their pockets shall allow them to come to watch them. Jimmy and his companions walk the three-kilometer road that takes them to their school while some of them cheer up singing the “Waka Waka” tune they have just seen in Shakira’s version. During the week-end they run after the ball in the newly build soccer field next to their school compound, and they dream about becoming the players they have seen on the screen.
Red Deporte started last year a relationship of cooperation with NUNBACD. So far we have visited them twice. Thanks to the generosity of a private donor from Ciudad Real we have been able to support them with the building of a soccer field and two grounds for volleyball and netball. The works have almost been brought to completion. Teddy Ayoo, who started this initiative five years ago collecting Kitgum’s most disadvantaged kids, thinks that although they still need more classrooms and dorms they can’t neglect what children need more: “a place to play and practice sports, because they have a right to enjoy and be happy”. Jimmy and his classmates, who belong to a generation of kids for whom moments of joy have been in very short supply, could not agree more.
