Grassroot Soccer and HIV/AIDS Prevention in South Africa

On December 1, World AIDS Day, numerous events were held around the world to raise awareness about the deadly disease. One of these events was a soccer tournament held in Bloemfontein, South African. Organized by a young woman named Leah Bellow-Handelman and others at the non-profit organization Grassroot Soccer, the event was intended to bring in teams for athletic competition, and to encourage them to get tested for HIV/AIDS. Bellow-Handelman took time out of her busy schedule recently to talk to me about the tournament she was organizing and other work she’s involved with at Grassroot Soccer.

Students involved with Grassroot Soccer (photo: Grassroot Soccer)

Leah Bellow-Handelman grew up in New York City. It was a bit of a shock for her, then, when she went to college in rural Ohio at Oberlin College. That shock, though, was nowhere near what she experienced when she graduated and headed off to South Africa to begin working at Grassroot Soccer. Grassroot Soccer (GRS) was founded in 2002 by Tommy Clark, son of Bobby Clark, current Notre Dame men’s coach and former Scotland international. Tommy had played professionally in Zimbabwe before returning to the US to get his medical degree. But Africa one of Africa’s most vexing problems – HIV/AIDS – drew him back, determined to use the sport he loved to fight the disease. He gave GRS its motto: “using the power of soccer in the fight against AIDS.” Since its founding, Grassroot Soccer has grown enormously in stature. On a recent visit to Africa, Bill Clinton visited a GRS program in Zambia.

Slick Willie in Zambia (photo: WinMcNamee / Getty Images / Grassroot Soccer)

Leah Bellow-Handelman first heard about GRS from a friend of a friend who had worked for the organization. A player at Oberlin who majored in Politics and African-American Studies, she had become interested in public health in Africa. What better way, Bellow-Handelman thought, to combine her interests than to work for GRS?

Since arriving in South Africa in September, she has been participating in various aspects of GRS’ work. The primary goal of GRS is to provide education and awareness about HIV/AIDS and how to prevent the disease. It is a massive task. Bellow-Handelman says that, when asked on a quiz if they can avoid getting HIV/AIDS, many children in South Africa believe they cannot. Her job, then, is to show them how they can avoid the deadly diseases. And her entrée into their lives is something they love: soccer. “Anytime [kids] see a soccer ball,” she says, “they want to play, they want to talk to you.”

Bellow-Handelman works on various projects at Grassroot Soccer. She spends a lot of time in schools, playing games that incorporate soccer and HIV/AIDS awareness. One game called “Risk Field” has students dribble a ball around cones, each of which represent a risk of exposure to HIV/AIDS. Another game is called “Find the Ball” and it involves students standing in a line and hiding tennis balls behind their backs while a classmate has to guess which players are holding balls. The balls are intended to represent HIV/AIDS and the premise behind the game, Bellow-Handelman says, is “you can’t tell who has HIV/AIDS by looking” at them.

South African students participate in a Grassroot Soccer game (photo: Grassroot Soccer)

Recently, she has begun organizing a “Street Football League.” Bellow-Handelman says that this project takes advantage of South African’s children natural proclivity to play soccer everywhere possible (“driving through the townships,” she says, there are “kids playing on every street corner”). Right now, it happens once a week and begins with 45 minutes of Grassroot Soccer HIV/AIDS awareness games and then a street soccer game with whoever has shown up. The project has been quite successful, Bellow-Handelman says. “It’s really incredible to see. We show up and there are ten kids. Within ten minutes, they see cones and a soccer ball and there are swarms of sixty, seventy, eighty kids.”

Soccer, Bellow-Handelman has found out, is her way to connect with South African children. When they get over their initial shock of seeing a white woman playing soccer (something she says is “fairly shocking” to South African kids), many come to talk with her. “There are constantly kids coming to the office to borrow a soccer ball. They don’t really speak English and we just juggle with them for hours. There’s a way to communicate with them through soccer and through sport.”

Children play street soccer (photo: Grassroot Soccer)

Of course, the soccer is the tool that GRS uses to promote its message of HIV/AIDS prevention. That work can be difficult in many ways. Bellow-Handelman is well aware of the statistics on the rates of infection in South Africa and knows that many of the students she works with already have HIV/AIDS. And she worries at times that GRS’ message of empowering students to prevent themselves from getting the disease is impractical for some. “It’s hard for me because I know we have these messages about the positive aspects of prevention: ‘you can make a choice’ and ‘you can avoid getting HIV.’ But the reality is a lot of these kids, unfortunately, can’t.” Belllow-Handelman notes that many children got HIV/AIDS at birth or through sexual abuse.

Another difficulty is being around children when they find out that they have HIV/AIDS. Attending a recent GRS event in Lesotho that had on-site testing, Bellow-Handelman says, “It’s not easy to tell a group of kids to get tested when it’s likely that they might test positive, but part of my job is getting them to understand that it’s better to know your status, regardless of what it may be.”

Even though she knows it is better for kids to know their status, the process of testing is emotionally taxing. To encourage kids to get tested, Bellow-Handelman decided to get tested herself.

As I watched so many kids go for testing, and told so many how important it was to know their status, it felt strangely hypocritical not to do so myself. I felt compelled to share the unpredictable emotions, fears, and potentially life-changing experience that so many kids had just gone through, so toward the end of the day, I walked into one of the tents to be tested myself. Even though I knew my status, there is something about walking into a testing and counseling tent, in the middle of rural Africa, that makes your heart beat just a little bit faster.

Leah Bellow-Handelman left the event knowing that she did not have HIV/AIDS. Not everyone was so fortunate: of the nearly 500 children tested at the event, 23 tested positive.

Children at the Lesotho at the “Test Your Team” tournament wait to get tested for HIV/AIDS (photo: Leah Bellow-Handelman)

Over a decade after the end of apartheid, Bellow-Handelman says that some people she’s met maintain views reminiscent of past eras. Some white people, she says, “laugh at us and tell us that our work is in vain and that ‘these people won’t change’.”

This is, fortunately, a minority view. Most people Bellow-Handelman has met support GRS’ work. “When people find out what we do, there are so many people who want to be trained in our program,” she says. Training locals to implement the GRS curriculum is an important goal of the organization. They don’t want to be seen as just the latest group of foreigners coming in telling Africans how to live their lives. And in the long term, GRS wants to make its program self-sustaining. “Our main goal is to come here, deliver this program, and train enough people so that when we leave, it won’t disappear,” Bellow-Handelman tells me.

GRS has been quite successful in getting locals trained in their program out to work in the community. This makes Bellow-Handelman quite proud. “It’s really easy to see … that our trainers, even if they started out as just people in the community, become community role models. Kids know them as Grassroot Soccer coaches and know that they’re a resource they can go to.”

Nearly all talk of soccer in South Africa these days is focused on the 2010 World Cup. Grassroot Soccer hopes to be involved with the tournament, using the high profile event to get out its message of HIV/AIDS prevention. Leah Bellow-Handelman has her own ideas about how she’d like to see the GRS model used at the tournament. She tells me excitedly that her dream is to do “Find the Ball” at halftime of a World Cup game. “That,” she says, “would be awesome.”

More information about Leah Bellow-Handelman’s work with Grassroot Soccer is available at her personal blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 7:21 am and is filed under Africa, Ethnicity/Race, Health, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.