Soccer & Life Skills for 100 Kids in Haiti

For more than a year now, we have been having a dream; starting our Fútbol Más program on another school in Haiti. In our pilot year on the first school in Haiti that our NGO set foot, we discovered a magic impact of our program, an impact as never experienced before.  To give you an idea of this magic impact, imagine the following:

Imagine being a kid again. Just like in your childhood, your heroes are still the national football players, however, you´re living in a country where the average temperature is 30 degrees during the day, every day of there year. Imagine on top of that, that there are no facilities for you to play, nowhere but on your school. And even there, the playing court is one that exists of rocks and pebbles. The warmth, the lack of water, and the absence of playing courts have caused that you have never been able to play after school, not even the sport you so love…

….And then all of a sudden during a normal day of school, two unknown people arrive to your school. They walk in your classroom with footballs and green cards (?) and are given a moment to talk. They start telling stories about the possibilities of playing football and teaching you about life, even with the participation of your parents. The have this strange positive vibe, and wave around this green card all the time?! They explain that you will not playing football just once or a few times, but a class every week, hopefully for the next years to come. And when you earn enough green cards with positive behaviour, you can even play a league against another Fútbol Más team! Is this really possible?...

Yes… you made this possible! With these two small paragraphs, I hope to have given you a glimpse of this special magic of Fútbol Más in Haiti, which lies in the emotions of the children. The special ´magic´ I referred before, is this constant existence and expression of positive emotions by the participants, caused by –in our experiences- such a simple thing: the possibility to play and learn.  

Thanks to all of your help, the situation I just described is not just fiction: this is exactly what has happened after your first donations in September. And it was not just experienced by one child, but by one hundred children!

What has happened since September:

• The school has been given the news that Fútbol Más is a ´go´;
• Two Chilean professionals with experience with the methodology agreed to go to Haití to set up the program and started preparing;
• This resulted in the contracting of a new Haitian professional coach;
• The gear for the children has been acquired and has arrived in Haiti;
• The children have been given introductions to our ´green card methodology´;
• The first introductory classes were given, and were a huge success (have a look at the pictures!).

What will happen in the following months:

• The two Chilean professionals will travel to December in the beginning of December to start the program as according to the methodology;
• One week later, the first Fútbol Más classes will be given, and the program starts!;
• From that very moment, the methodology will be implemented according to the plans.

This methodology that we write about takes into account two very important factors in the positive development of children (apart from the social sports classes): their parents, and the social capital that surrounds the children. It is not for nothing that the objective of the methodology is not just to give classes to children, it is to: ´help create a resilience-enabling environment that stimulates resilient processes in the children´. Helping the parents to participate in the program, and help them with ´positive parenting´ is one of the three pillars in our work. Workshops and meetings with the parents will begin as well as soon as the program starts!

This is normally not just part of the methodology, it is something the parents wish to do so as well. To give you an example of this, we would like to show a quote of Roselain from a parental-meeting (mother of a participating girl on the first school in Canaan, 2014);

´We would like for Fútbol Más to work with us even more to help us understand the changes that our children are going through, because it is something really big you are doing: changing their reality and making our children happier. It would be good to work together to be able to feel what they are feeling´

We hope to very soon show you similar quotes from the upcoming meetings with the children’s´ parents!

Once more, we would like you to thank you for your participation in this project, while at the same time not forgetting that it has not ended yet. Providing these children with this life-changing experience would truly not be possible without the help you have given us, and thus them.

After having ´scored the first goals´, the implementation of the complete methodology (starting the classes, including the parents, and working with the improvement of the social capital) on the new school is considered to be the next goal! We look forward to writing you more news about this very soon!

The Fútbol Más Family