After
months of discussing my aspirations to use soccer to teach kids about health
topics, I’m happy to report that I was finally able to accomplish this
goal! The trajectory of my service that
led to this 4 day project goes something like this:
In
May 2013, I took Ibrahim and another village counterpart to a training for
volunteers and their counterparts run by an organization called Coaching for
Hope. The organization focuses on using
soccer to teach young people about HIV/AIDS. The seven day training was a great
experience for the Americans and Burkinabe that attended. Burkinabe loved the facilitation techniques
used by the coaches and often seemed to forget that they were being trained to
teach others, not to play soccer. At the
end of the training, my counterparts were each given a soccer ball and a
certificate for completing the training.
Upon
returning to village, however, I realized that implemented the Coaching for Hope
program would be difficult. As there is
only a primary school in my village, middle school and high school students
bike 5 km to the adjacent village to continue their schooling. Unfortunately, the adjacent village isn’t in
the coverage area of my health clinic, meaning I’m not supposed to be doing
projects there. And obviously primary
school is a little too young to discuss sexual health, even if soccer is
involved.
I
was still determined to implement the program, so I convinced Ibrahim to come
play soccer with a group of young men I’d been playing with on and off. The guys were happy to get a couple new
soccer balls, but they were confused when, after a week, Ibrahim and I sat them
down and tried to explain the Coaching for Hope program. These guys were already in school for 8 hours
a day. They just wanted to have some fun
and play soccer until it got too dark to see.
So Ibrahim and I let them use the soccer balls we had gotten from
Coaching for Hope until they were both broken.
To be fair, the guys took good care of the balls. They lasted for 3 months, which is a long
time by Burkina standards. A group of
Burkina children can destroy a soccer ball in a matter of days.
During
the months June and July I continued to play soccer when I could, but Ibrahim
lost interest and was spending most days working on a project based in
Banfora. However, during a June meeting
of the HIV/AIDS Committee there was a ray of hope. An NGO called Grassroots Soccer (GRS) had
contacted Peace Corps Burkina and offered an array of partnership options for
Peace Corps volunteers. GRS is similar
to Coaching for Hope, but they are a larger NGO, more focused on health
education than soccer, and have a department specifically dedicated to forming
partnerships with Peace Corps countries led by a former Zambia Peace Corps
volunteer named Kristen. I immediately
volunteered to take the lead on communicating with GRS.
I
discussed my aspirations with another volunteer on the committee, Alex, and we
researched GRS partnerships opportunities.
We contacted Kristen and requested individual GRS kits, which the
organization will send to Peace Corps volunteers free of charge. During the research, we also found that GRS had
an office in Cape Town, where I happened to be traveling to in mid-August. I contacted Kristen and found that she worked
in the Cape Town office. We agreed to
meet during my August vacation.
The
meeting with Kristen was phenomenal. We
discussed the programs that GRS had developed specifically for PCVs and how GRS
was involved in other Peace Corps countries.
It became obvious during our discussion that many other Peace Corps
country offices have WAY more money to spend on trainings and projects than
Burkina. One of the reasons is the US
Government’s PEPFAR initiative (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), which
allocates billions of dollars of aid money to fight HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan
Africa. Peace Corps offices in many of
the countries in southern Africa with high HIV/AIDS prevalence rates receive
large chunks of PEPFAR funds. Burkina receives no PEPFAR funds due to the low
HIV/AIDS prevalence rate in the country.
However,
Kristen mentioned that GRS had leftover funds in the expansion portion of their
budget and that she’d be open to working with PCBF to set up a training in January
for volunteers and their counterparts.
Clearly this was an incredible opportunity, as GRS was offering to send
a training team and materials. I quickly
emailed our acting country director to discuss adding the training to the end
of the In Service Training of the new education group in January. He promptly turned it down, claiming the
budget had already been set for the 2014 fiscal year and that adding days to
the IST would cost PCBF between $5,000 - $10,000 extra. While his first point was true, his second
assertion was completely false, as most hotels in Burkina run about $15-$20 per
night and transport was already covered by the IST budget. However, I was in no position to argue and
informed Kristen of his decision before leaving Cape Town. While neither of us were completely surprised
after our respective Peace Corps experiences, we were still disappointed. We agreed that GRS expansion in Burkina was
going to have to be mainly volunteer-led.
In
October, however, our Director of Programming and Training, Paul, met with
Kristen during a Peace Corps training conference in South Africa and became
interested in GRS. He encouraged me to
work with GRS to set up a training for the new group of education volunteers
that had been sent to site at the end of August. Clearly this was frustrating to hear after
Kristen had offered exactly the same thing during our Cape Town meeting. But he agreed to continue to work with me to
set up a GRS training in the coming year.
Unfortunately, Paul resigned for family reasons the week after
Thanksgiving.
After
further discussions with Kristen, I realized that Paul had neglected to inform
me that Peace Corps country offices pay GRS around $10,000 to conduct a
training, not including the transport and lodging costs of participating
volunteers and counterparts. Kristen
also informed me that GRS only allows certified trainers to conduct GRS
trainings, which means that I wouldn’t be permitted to set up a GRS training of
my own, regardless of any experience I gained implementing the programs. Considering the budget for the entire fiscal
year of 2014 for HIV/AIDS projects in Burkina is around $15,000, Peace Corps
Burkina would never be able to afford an official GRS training.
During
October, I was busy assisting with the training of the new group of volunteers,
but we finally received our packages from GRS at the end of the month. It was pretty discouraging to find that the
kits took over 3 months to get from South Africa to Burkina, but not altogether
surprising. The kits contained the Peace
Corps SKILLZ HIV/AIDS education program in both English and French, the Peace
Corps SKILLZ Malaria program in English, monitoring/evaluation tools, a flash
drive with electronic copies, and an “indestructible” soccer ball.
During
November, I explained the GRS program to Ibrahim and consistently tried to work
with him to translate the SKILLZ Malaria program to French. This process was extremely frustrating for
many reasons, but mostly because my written French is terrible and Ibrahim was
super flakey with meetings due to continuing work with the project in
Banfora. He had told me his contract
with the organization was done in November, but apparently they had asked him
to stay on in some capacity or he was trying to make himself valuable enough
for them to keep him on. Either way, it
became clear that this project was only happening because I wanted to do it,
which is contrary to the development approach of the Peace Corps but seemed to
be the only way to accomplish my goal.
My plan
was to finish writing out the French translation at site, then type it up and
print it out during a Thanksgiving trip to Ouaga. I can’t exactly use my computer for long
periods of time at site due to lack of electricity. During translation, I also realized that the
SKILLZ Malaria program could be organized better and needed to be adapted to
the Burkina context, which involved updating the English manual as well. Combined with the fact that I wasn’t getting
much help with the translation, I didn’t accomplish as much as I thought I
would at site.
When
I arrived in Ouaga, I dedicated an entire day to working on the English and
French versions of the SKILLZ Malaria program.
I realized that it was the first time I had sat down to do actually work
at a computer in over a year. Gone was
my college era ability to sit down at a computer and crank out a 10 page
research power in 8 hours. So I trudged
through a day of work, accomplishing less than half of what I planned to. I took an extra day in the capital and still
didn’t finish, but that may have been due to an intense food hangover the day
after Thanksgiving. I was getting burnt
out so I decided to finish and edit the program at site, then print out the
finished version in a regional capital.
One
of the key obstacles to any project in Burkina is the issue of money. PCVs have to convince any counterparts they
work with to volunteer their time. If you need money to buy materials for a
project, you can apply for a grant from the Peace Corps office, you can find a
person (or people) in the community who
will donate to the project, or you can pay out of your own pocket (clearly not
recommended). Luckily, I didn’t have to
deal with any of these options, as there were leftover soccer balls and mosquito
nets from a Science Camp that I had helped out at during September. The volunteer who organized the camp was kind
enough to leave the leftover supplies in Bobo, which I picked up on my way back
to site.
When
I returned to site after Thanksgiving, it took me about a week to get Ibrahim
to set up a meeting with the director of the primary school. We met and the director agreed to dedicate 3
afternoons to the SKILLZ program, which Ibrahim and I agreed was enough time to
fit in the 4 practices of the program.
Unfortunately, I was going to traveling to Ouaga again for the Swear In
ceremony of the new volunteers and wouldn’t be returning from the capital until
a day before the project, which left little time for preparation. I gave him
the completed manual before I left and asked him to read it and be prepared
when I returned.
I
met with Ibrahim the day after I got back from Ouaga and we briefly discussed
the program for the first day of SKILLZ Malaria. While he claimed to have read
the manual, it was pretty clear that he hadn’t.
Luckily he’s about as good at improvisation as Burkinabe can get. We
showed up to the school to start the program and of course no one was
there. The kids usually get a half day
on Thursdays, so even though the director had told them to come back at 3pm,
there were no guarantees. By 4pm,
though, around 30 kids had showed up and we were able to start.
The
first practice focused on the basics of malaria, making sure kids understood
that it’s a serious disease that can kill you, which people often don’t acknowledge
in village. We used the game “Bed Net
Ball,” to illustrate the basics of malaria prevention. Three teams used bed sheets to throw a ball
as high as they could in the air and then catch it. The concept of “teamwork” is not well
understood by Burkinabe children, so Ibrahim and I quickly realized that we had
to demonstrate how to work together to throw the ball up in the air and catch
it.
After
the kids could successfully throw the ball up in the air and catch it, we told
them that the bed sheet represented a mosquito net and the ball represented a
mosquito with malaria. The goal of the game was to throw the ball as high as
they could into the air and then cover themselves with the “mosquito net”
before the ball hit the ground. Anyone
who wasn’t covered when the ball hit the ground got “malaria” and had to go see
the major at the health clinic (a coach standing between the groups) to get
prescribed medicine (a high five). The
game was a huge hit. Burkinabe children
don’t get to play organized games very often (if it all), which makes teaching
them one incredibly difficult, but makes even the most childish games extremely
popular with youth of any age.
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| Bed Net Ball! |
Friday
afternoon we ran into a variety of different problems. All of the kids were at school in the
afternoon, but we were only doing the SKILLZ program with the oldest class of
30-40 kids. Luckily we had made an
attendance sheet the day before and called role to make sure we got the same
group of kids. Apparently, the teachers were neglecting to teach the other
classes that afternoon. This made the
next hour an exercise in herding away the Burkinabe kids who weren’t
participating, which can only honestly be accomplished by threatening to hit
them. While I wasn’t comfortable doing
this, Ibrahim was. I guess that’s what
counterparts are for!
The
second practice was focused on proper mosquito net usage. After a brief warm up, four teams competed to
set up a mosquito net properly using string tied to whatever tree branches or
other forms of support the kids could find.
After the groups were finished, we walked around with everyone and
critiqued the setup, asking the kids to fix any problems. Clearly the main goal of the competition was
to reinforce proper bed net usage, but the exercise was also designed to
demonstrate that mosquito nets can be set up anywhere, both inside and
outside. Many Burkinabe sleep outside
during the hot season without mosquito nets, leading to hundreds of unnecessary
cases of malaria.
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| How many kids can fit under a mosquito net? |
The
last two practices were to be conducted on Saturday afternoon, which Ibrahim
and I both had reservations about. Kids
only have school for half the day before they are released for their weekend. But Sunday was an even worse option, as most
Burkinabe dedicate the day to family and expect kids to be at home. Saturday afternoon we prepared and went to
the school, but only about 20 out of the 35 kids who had participated in the
program showed up. I wanted to
reschedule the sessions for Monday, but the school director wasn’t home and he
wasn’t picking up his phone. We told the
kids that we there weren’t enough people to complete the program that afternoon
and they were legitimately disappointed.
They asked how many kids they needed and promised to get at least 30
people from their class to the school tomorrow morning. I was pretty blown away because Burkinabe
kids rarely plan ahead to make time for health education, but clearly that was
one of the benefits of designing health education around soccer. We decided to trust the kids and told them we
would come to the school at 9am the next day.
The
third practice focused on proper treatment of malaria, emphasizing the risks of
using traditional medicine and/or street medicine. Many Burkinabe will buy malaria medicine from
traveling salesmen who assure them that it is better quality than the medicine
from the health clinic. Burkinabe also
still hold traditional healers in high esteem, depending on the community. After reviewing the symptoms of malaria and
the risks of taking street and traditional medicine, we divided the kids into
six teams and played “Health Ball.” The goal of the game was to pass the ball
as many times as possible between the members of the team without letting it
touch the ground. The twist was that
half the teams were given a regular soccer ball and the other half a tiny
plastic ball. We switched the balls
between teams then brought the group together to watch two teams compete. We told them that both teams had been
infected with malaria. The team with the soccer ball had gone to the CSPS to
get prescribed medicine, while the team with the small ball had taken street
medicine. The first team to make 5
successful passes “got healthy.” The
kids tended to care way more about the unfairness of the competition than the
overarching health message, but I think we got the point across.
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| Easier to pass with a soccer ball = Easier to cure malaria with the proper medication |
The last
practice was designed to encourage the kids to confront malaria risks in the
community and educate others. We used
the concept of a red card in soccer to illustrate how to confront risky
behaviors. We had come up with short
theater sketches that illustrated common scenarios of prevention, adherence,
and treatment. All of the kids were
given a red card and told to silently “give it” when they viewed a risky
behavior in each sketch. Each sketch was
followed by a discussion of why the red card was given and whether or not it
was a common scenario in village.
Ibrahim and I demonstrated the first sketch then called on volunteers to
play the roles in a few more. They
pretended to take traditional medicine, cut mosquito nets, and refuse to go to
the health clinic while their peers gave them red cards for each risky
behavior. They loved it.
 |
| Giving the Red Card |
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| Red Card Skit |
Evaluation
of the SKILLZ program was conducted through a small activity at the beginning
of each practice called “Take a Stand.”
We would ask the students to close their eyes, then read potentially
controversial statements about malaria and ask the students to put their hands
on their heads it they agreed. After we
noted the results, we had the students open their eyes and called on volunteers
to defend their position. It was difficult
to make sure the children were being honest and not just following the group,
but there were still a few kids who would argue the wrong side of each
statement. The last practice was then followed by a post test consisting of the
“Take a Stand” statements of each practice.
After
the last practice, Ibrahim and I sat down to eat some chicken at a new bar in
town that is conveniently located right next to the primary school. We chose a live chicken and the waitress took
care of the rest, delivering an amazing grilled chicken 45 min later. I’m not sure if it was the occasion, the
papaya we cut up as an appetizer, or the actual chicken, but it was one of the
best I’ve had in Burkina.
Overall,
I’m extremely happy that I was finally able to complete this project. I was able to observe a clear improvement in
the students’ comprehension of malaria prevention and treatment through the
soccer program. I’m planning to discuss the SKILLZ Malaria program with the
Community Health Agents in the two other villages within my health clinic’s
coverage area to see if we can implement it at those primary schools as
well. I’m also working with the HIV/AIDS
committee to get the GRS HIV/AIDS materials to a small group of volunteers in
the new education stage to implement at their site. Hopefully these experiences will provide a
catalyst for the expansion of Grassroots Soccer programs in Burkina Faso.
Peace
Corps is notoriously bad at providing volunteers with actual materials and
programs to implement at their site. Grassroots
Soccer is an organization that recognizes this shortcoming and is actively
working to address it. Not to mention
their methods of monitoring and evaluating the SKILLZ programs are miles ahead
of anything taught by Peace Corps. I
specifically remember a moment in the Cape Town office when Kristen showed me a
graphic breakdown of GRS involvement in individual Peace Corps countries. It blew me away after dealing with the MS-DOS
retro results reporting program of Peace Corps. The level of competence and adaptability of
Kristen and other members of the Grassroots Soccer staff has been extremely
refreshing after dealing with the stifling bureaucracy of Burkinabe
organizations and the Peace Corps Office here.
But
nothing that’s easy is ever worth doing right?
Except making a quesadilla in the microwave. Or lying on the beach. Damn that’s not a good
maxim at all.
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| It's hard to get people to sleep under these things. This one was just being used in a friendly game of tug of war between village dogs |
