The Core

There were shipping containers everywhere.  They were a bunch of different colors, some with the remnants of their previous use still emblazoned on their exteriors, though many of them were painted over to match their new function.  On the streets of New Brighton, Zwide, Kwazakhele, Motherwell. and many of the other townships of Port Elizabeth, these shipping containers have been repurposed to house barber shops, beauty salons, spazas (small convenience stores), and other small businesses.  These makeshift stores lined nearly all of the main streets of the townships as we drove around this past Saturday morning.  Just as the world was waking up, we were taking an unexpected leisurely tour of many of the city’s townships, watching as many hard-working folks were setting up shop for the day.

That was just one of the sights that stuck out to me as Siya showed us around.  There were calculated lines of quaint homes, each with identical Tasol solar panels sticking out above their roofs.  On the contrary, there were small shacks made of scrap corrugated metal squares pieced together to make a semi-reliable structure; there were some homes made of mud and sticks.  There were long lines of people waiting outside of gas stations waiting to pay a few rand for electricity to power their homes that day.  I had a small fright as I watched a white man with a bulletproof vest and what looked like an AK-47 coming out of a money truck as he yelled at people to vacate the premises as his colleague refilled an Standard Bank ATM.  But there were also the dynamic hawkers who yelled out of bus windows to get passengers.  And there were children running around the streets without a care in the world.  This was their home.  This was normal.  I must not forget that.

After several hours of driving around running errands, and now with an extra staff member on hand, we all drove out to Addo, a small rural town about an hour away from the city that is famous for both its oranges and its elephant reserve.  Every Saturday for roughly the next two months, Grassroot Soccer is working with the citrus fruit company San Miguel to deliver the standard Skillz Core curriculum to the children of employees who work at their farm.  Skillz Core is the standard curriculum delivered to a younger audience, and it goes through all of the basic information about HIV for those who would have had little or no knowledge of it previously.

As we pull up into a dirt-road neighborhood tucked behind what seemed like miles of orange groves, we see a large field riddled with children running about and a man with a familiar yellow Grassroot Soccer t-shirt.  He, a San Miguel employee himself, was one of the handful of workers who were trained to be a GRS coach for this specific program.  Once we pulled up to the soccer pitch, the kids began staring in our direction, and almost immediately, Ntombi, one of the office’s CPCs, got the intervention started.

The day’s lesson was one of the earlier ones in the Skillz Core curriculum that was focused on the risk factors of contracting HIV.  The lesson was reinforced by a game called Risk Field in which teams of participants dribble a soccer ball around a set of cones that represent different risky behaviors such as unprotected sex or multiple concurrent partners.  If someone were to hit a cone, he or she would have to do a push-up as a consequence.  The game was played in three rounds: in the first, only the dribbler him/herself has to pay the consequence for the risky behavior; in the second try, the participant’s entire group of teammates has to do so; and in the final round, the entire community (the interns included) had to drop down and do a set of 3.  The goal of this practice is to determine the risk factors of getting HIV and to reinforce that individual actions have group repercussions.

For much of the time, Claire and I observed off the side as we watched Ntombi work her magic.  Since the entire practice is done in Xhosa, it’s fun trying to follow along with the lesson, and sometimes there are some English words that help us figure out what’s being discussed.  I vividly remember the participants repeating the word “condom” over and over again.  Eventually, being a natural with toddlers, Claire started playing around with the children who came along who were too young to be part of the intervention.  As a group, we all went and played some Ring Around the Roses, Claire taught them Duck-Duck-Goose, and I was awed by how well some of them sang and danced.  I have years of training under my belt, but sometimes, you just gotta have raw talent.

For me, it was the first time I saw a real intervention, and I loved seeing the participants, some of whom were very into it.  There was this one smarty-pants girl who knew all the answers, and there were some on the opposite end of the spectrum whose main concern was kicking around the soccer ball and socializing with their friends.  Regardless, all of these kids for this specific intervention came on their own volition (because it’s not through a school and on a Saturday), so I commend them for their willingness to spend their Saturday mornings learning about HIV and having a little fun in the process.

And that, my friends, is a typical Saturday.