Mathare Youth Sports Association -- Giving Kids a Sporting Chance
February 13, 2000
CharityVillage.com - NewsWeek
July 19, 1999
Mathare Youth Sports Association -- Giving Kids a Sporting Chance by Randi Hansen Just over the small bridge, spanning a murky, grey stream, sprawls one of the largest slums in Africa. No one can prepare you for the sight, and pictures cannot tell the entire story. Thousands of tin shacks, children in tattered clothing with bleeding ulcers on their lips, goats and chickens feeding on the house-high garbage heaps and the smell of urine and feces overwhelm even the heartiest traveler. This is the Mathare slum, located on the edge of Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. Kenya is a fascinating country filled with contrasts -- contrasts in terrain, contrasts in climate and, most evident, contrasts in lifestyles. The poor are very poor and the wealthy... well what can I say... they are VERY wealthy. Mathare is home to hundreds of thousands of people, primarily single mothers with children. I was told that there were up to 700,000 -- maybe a million people living there -- although it was difficult to say since it has been too dangerous to take censuses "down there", so no one really knows the exact population. It was in the slum at Mathare that I met Bob Munro, a transplanted Canadian from St.Catherines. After visiting the Mathare slum in the 1980s Bob decided that he could make a contribution to the community. He calls it "pay back time" and pay back he has. Bob recognized that the children needed some assistance, after seeing dozens of them playing soccer with a makeshift soccer ball - plastic bags rolled tightly together and tied with string. In 1987 he started the Mathare Youth Sports Association, better known as MYSA (Pronounced my-sa). In less that a decade MYSA grew from one soccer team to more than 700 teams, giving 10,000 slum children the opportunity to play organized soccer. Although Bob still oversees MYSA, it is now run by 26-year-old Maurice Njoroge, who is from the Mathare neighbourhood. The organization's programming now includes AIDS awareness and garbage removal. Garbage removal is a critical problem. In Mathare, garbage has literally devoured the community. It is piled higher than a two-storey house where children, goats and chickens congregate, eat and play for hours. And to make matters even worse - try to imagine one toilet for every ten thousand people and the contents pouring onto the paths between homes and into the small river where people wash. Bob along with many associates have convinced others that help was desperately needed for this community and help has come their way in many forms. Soccer balls, shoes and clothing have been donated, wheelbarrows, shovels, rakes and a generous gift of a backhoe and garbage truck from the Norwegian Government helps haul the garbage. All these small and substantial contributions have turned an entire community around - there is more self-esteem, more self-confidence and now the talk of Kenya's top soccer scorer who is a "graduate" of MYSA making it big. There is a lot to be proud of.