The beautiful game

Oh, I know, the zero-to-hero approach to posting probably violates some blog etiquette somewhere and isn't that nice to readers either. Deal with it, this is for a good cause.

Back on a really oddly warm day in December (I think it was in the 50s), I purchased an umbrella from this young group of girls selling them on the Connecticut Ave, just north of Dupont Circle. Not that I am a giant cheapskate prick or anything, but normally I don't do the roadside fundraising bit. But I gave them a few minutes to tell me that they were a local area soccer team headed to South Africa to a township outside of Port Elizabeth to conduct a soccer clinic for girls there. I was sold, I studied abroad in SA and it was a life-changing experience, right away I knew I was giving money to these kids. But it got better. Not only are they putting on soccer clinics for girls in a country where girls are not traditionally allowed to play soccer, but they were also incorporating HIV/AIDS prevention instruction into the clinics. How cool is that?

It is through this program called Grassroots Soccer, a group committed to:

"Using the power of soccer in the fight against AIDS, Grassroot Soccer provides African youth with the skills and support to live HIV free.

We do this by continuously improving our innovative HIV/AIDS life-skills curriculum, sharing our program and concept effectively, and utilizing the popularity of soccer to increase our impact.

You can read more about these girls in this story from the WaPo, and follow them on this "World's United" blog that the WaPo is hosting to chronicle their activities.

Even talking about HIV/AIDS there is taboo, which is partially why the situation continues to get worse there, so I love the idea of trying to harness the immense popularity of football in Africa to help fight and cure the HIV/AIDS epidemic there. And I love that the messengers here are not teachers or government types or even some smelly Peace Corps volunteers, but the actual peers of the targeted audience: young girls on the verge of becoming young women. Pretty cool stuff. Go support something like this in your neck of the woods.