Since coming to Refilwe, I have been very involved with the girls' netball team. Every Wednesday as an afterschool activity another teacher and I take our team of 10 girls up to Refilwe's netball/tennis courts for netball training. Now, in my early years I was a keen netball player (I may be using the term 'keen' loosely here; my memories of netball games involve me as Goal Shooter having friendly chats with the Goal Keeper the whole game while the ball never came down our end...) but since I was about 11, netball was a PE only sport for me. Needless to say, over the past three months I have grown much more affectionate towards the sport as a whole and have even started tearing up the court as the Wing Attack for Refilwe's All Star Ladies Team.
The girls that play for our school team have varied abilities, but are quickly learning to play together as a team. Last week we took them to a nearby high school for their first 'real' game against another team. What an experience it was for our poor girls: we drove in to the carpark, got out of our cars and had to walk the length of a large quadrangle, feeling the stares of the 200 students watching us arrive. The "netball" court (which was actually a tennis court with chalk-drawn lines and circles) was then surrounded by said 200 students, singing and cheering for their home team. To say that our girls were intimidated would be an understatement: they had strange bewildered looks on their faces the entire first quarter. As they grew more comfortable their confidence grew, to the point where they even scored a couple of goals. At the end of the day I was quite the proud coach!
Now, I realise most of you reading from the US probably have no idea that netball is even a sport. I'm not going to explain it to you here; get your uneducated selves on to Wikipedia and learn all about it.
Netball has also been the topic of the week for many of the ladies here at Refilwe. Friday afternoon we also had a 'real' match against a team sent by one of our corporate donors. (The photos dispersed throughout this blog are from our game- I was too busy [badly] umpiring the girls' game to take photos. Next time!) In preparation, we had a couple of practice matches during the week that consisted of half of the Refilwe mob heading up to the courts for some crazy netball times. You know you're comfortable with a group of people when you're running around screaming their names and jabbing them in the ribs! It was certainly hectic, but such a reminder of the way in which sport can bring people together.
Community development organisations often use sports as a way of connecting with and building communities that may otherwise be difficult to reach. I remember learning in my uni days about soccer programs started in some African countries as a means of HIV/AIDS awareness and education. Sport can be a universal language that teaches about healthy living, teamwork and community building. For young people it can be a means by which they become engaged in something new and productive, drawing them into an organisation without any strings attached. In South Africa, there are so many things going up against young people living in poverty: difficult home lives and a lack of resources and/or motivation to engage in positive activities mean that many young people end up using alcohol or other drugs and entering into unhealthy relationships (either friendship or romantic). Both have the potential to put a young person at a higher risk of contracting avoidable diseases and making unwise life choices. It sounds simple, but just providing free alternatives such as regular sporting activity can be life changing for some.
Some of you netball enthusiasts may have scrutinised the photos well enough to notice that the game we played on Friday was not the most professional of matches. It was good fun, though. Playing against a corporate sponsor's team, we had the chance to put faces to an otherwise faceless body and teach them a little bit about what Refilwe is all about (as well as a few netball rules to some!). And this time our team won, 16-7. Not that winning is the point, but it's still nice!
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