Dear diary ... My return to South Africa

Dear diary,

Four years ago I went on a holiday to South Africa with my sister and my parents for the Christmas holiday and we had a great time over there. We stayed mostly in Cape Town and surroundings. We climbed Table Mountain, saw a Great White shark, went to Nelson Mandela’s jail on Robben Island and had an awesome safari. But we all agreed that in the end, the best day was when we went into the townships of Cape Town with a local lady.

We started playing football with Precious, her husband and her kids and pretty soon more kids ran onto the pitch to join us. At one point we were playing football and netball with at least 50 people, also adults. Everyone was so happy and there were locals telling us that it was about 5 months ago they last played sports with that many people. That was the day I realized that I can personally make people happy by using sports as a means to bring people together. Since that trip, it has been a dream of mine to return to the South African townships and do something good for the locals through sports. 

Today it is two weeks ago that I arrived in Port Elizabeth for my internship at United Through Sport and I can already say that it is exactly what I expected and more. I am here to organize an event but in order to that I do have to know what UTS does, how they work, etc. Therefore I started helping the volunteers with sports coaching for the first week in the townships (slums). It is great to coach the kids, they are so happy, just like four years ago in Cape Town. It is also nice to see them improve so quickly. Sometimes it is hard to understand them and for them to understand us, since they speak three different languages in the townships and sometimes it just sounds like they mixed them up. They speak English and the beautiful languages of Xhosa (with those clicking sounds) and Afrikaans (close to Dutch). But the language everybody speaks, body language, gets us far enough when we do not understand each other.

So far I have coached tennis, hockey, rugby and basketball. Football is the only sport I haven’t coached yet. Not that there is any difference besides the actual sport. We just play some little warm-up games, work on their techniques and usually finish with an actual game. With every sport we end a coaching session in the same way, with the Tikkie Tikkie Tanga: we scream this phrase and some others, the kids follow and in the end everyone is screaming the ‘Tikkie Tikkie Tanga’ as loud as possible. An awesome way to end the lesson on a high note, there is not a single kid (or adult) that does not love that.

It was a great two first weeks and it’s great to know I’ll be here for another eight weeks to organize a tournament in march and help other interns with a 5-a-side football tournament, holiday camps and a fundraise. I enjoy everyday here, it is great to be there for the kids and I absolutely love the UTS family with all the volunteers and interns, but I will tell more about that family in my next blog.

Baie Dankie

Roy