Stories from the Field: Lira

“Sometimes you want to cry, but you have to stay strong,” Lira tells me.

“There was one girl, the oldest one in the class.  So beautiful.  Her hair, her nails, everything was so nice,” Lira begins to retell, unexpectedly telling me the most impactful story she had encountered in her two years as a Grassroot Soccer SKILLZ Coach.  Lira is very quiet but very thoughtful.  You can always tell that she’s thinking just by looking at her.  When she musters up the courage to speak, rest assured that it’s something worth sharing, and you darn straight better be listening.

“She was so confident.  You could see it, you could feel it.”

Lira goes on to tell me that the female student, the perfect prototype of young South African woman, was willingly abused by her older boyfriend.  She would often get beat by her older boyfriend, often as much as three times a day.  The young girl was complacent about it, and was actually quite proud of it, telling an entire room of her female classmates. 

“He gives me money, so it’s okay,” the girl announces to the class, as Lira stared, dumbfounded.  The young participant was only 15 years old.

It was heartbreaking, Lira expressed, that someone so young has already been a victim of domestic abuse and culturally-ingrained gender based violence.  Moreover, the teenager had been impressionable enough to feel like her treatment was warranted and that this kind of behavior is acceptable.  Already, she has been exposed to engendered inequalities and has developed habits that may be hard to break.

What was most heartbreaking to me was what Lira told me next:

“Since she was the most beautiful, smart, outspoken girl in the class, everyone looked up to her.  And they didn’t see anything wrong with her story.  They think, ‘Well, if she got hit and gets something out of it, then I can be hit and get money, too!  Look at her, she’s perfect!’”  As if perfect was defined by a broken statue of a black goddess, crumbling from the inside, as long as it maintained its outer luster.

“What if that girl stays in that relationship?,” Lira asks me.  “Even if she moves on, what will she expect from her next relationship?  She may never have a good man who will treat her right because she’s expecting money.  How was I supposed to change her mind?”

These were questions I had no answers to, yet they were questions that Grassroot Soccer coaches face on a regular basis.

Our coaches are sent to be role models, to create dialogue, to ruffle some feathers.  And sometimes that’s hard to do in situations like these.  To be a role model for those who already have them.  To create dialogue about topics that nobody wants to discuss.  To ruffle feathers where the feathers are unmovable.  It’s a much harder task than what we read on paper.

Coaches, like Lira in this predicament, felt like they’ve needed to back-track; they want to erase all the things that young people have seen (or sometimes have experienced firsthand), but they know that isn’t possible.  Instead, they have to challenge firmly entrenched ideals, to dig deep into the core of people’s attitudes, and try to make impactful change in their behavior.

The question this posits is how early we need to start tackling issues of sex and domestic violence.  “We need to start younger,” Lira shared, thinking that the vital conversations she had with this particular participant in that classroom was already too late.  If there’s anything I’ve learned from public health, it’s that it’s way easier to prevent something from happening than to stave it away it once it’s already happened.

Grassroot Soccer provides a safe space for important conversations to occur, to curb harmful habits before they develop, and to empower a generation of young people not only to stay HIV-free and healthy in the biomedical sense of the word, but to also have healthy relationships with one another.  This is something that is often overlooked in the Grassroot Soccer model: that SKILLZ Coaches are promoting healthy lifestyles (physically and emotionally), of which being HIV-negative plays vital a part in the reality of young South Africans today.