Our friend Chema Caballero, who has worked for many years in Sierra Leone as a missionary, has just published this piece (in Vida Nueva, Spain’s leading religious magazine) about the outcome of the recently finished World Cup.

For a whole month we all had Africa on our TV screens. The media did not give us another alternative. The Soccer World Cup have showed a different face of a continent that usually hits the headlines only when there are wars, famines o epidemic outbreaks in its soil.

All have come out as winners in this tournament. Africa has enjoyed a positive public image, FIFA has walked away with huge benefits, all TVs had records in audience, all trans-national companies and oficial sponsors have done the business of their lives, the Chinese have made money selling vuvuzelas, national flags and vests donning the colors of all the teams. Banks and consumer goods stores have attracted plenty of customers with their bargain promises if Spain made it to the semi-finales, and even the Oberhausen aquarius, in Germany, has become the focus of attention to over 600 TV companies broadcasting live the forecasts of Octopus Paul!

But the real winner has been Spain, winner of the World Cup for the first time in history. The whole country clad in red vests and hanging national flags in streets and balconies. And, of course, the ones who have won more are national team’s players, with an extra 600,000-euro bonus each. Only with one of these bonuses, in Sierra Leone we could pay school fees for 30,000 boys and girls attending Secondary school.

As it happens in al competitions, there have losers too: thousands of South Africans who were forcibly evicted from their homes to make room for new stadiums and hotels so that the thousands of visitors could be accommodated. Most of them continue to wait in vain for the new houses they were promised. Among the losers you can also count the thousands of security guards who we paid ten times less of what they were promised, and the millions of South Africans who continue to suffer from unemployment or from lack of access to basic education.