My journey to Switzerland was a success and a trip of a life time.

My journey started when I was in Durban, this was going to be the first time leaving South Africa to go to a foreign country like Switzerland. My longest flight was 10hr 40min, this took me from Johannesburg straight to Frankfurt, Germany; which was a very tough flight as I was alone the whole way and had no one to talk to. None the less I arrived at my destination safely, and met a few people along the way and I made a friend who is named Tatenda from Zimbabwe, we were in the same camp along with another 30 and we all came from different countries around Africa and we spoke different languages from 16 different places.

In the camp on the 1^st day we had a welcome speech from Mr Wilfred Lemke and he told a lot about the United Nations Office on Sport for Development & Peace (UNOSDP) and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (UNO MDG’s) which were: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; Achieve universal and primary education; Promote gender equality & empower women; Reduce child mortality; Improve maternal health; Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria & other diseases; Ensure Evironmental Sustainability; Develop a Global Partnership for Development.

We all use sport as a tool to send awareness to the community or the teens in our own community, it surprising how different sport can send the same awareness and all sports have one or two things that improve our social skills. The 1^st sport we all participated in was boxing, lead by BOX GIRLS. Boxing was great and I learnt a lot from it, you always need timing and you must be confident, if you want to send awareness through boxing you can and it’s very different from soccer because they are positions that teach you how to balance in life and how to overcome obstacle. I would like to implement boxing in our organization because we have a boxer, and just to use the simple boxing not the professional boxing skills would be good. We were also lucky to be visited by the FC Basel coach and his assistance team to teach us more about being a good coach, they mentioned a very good rule; BEING A GOOD COACH MEANS BEING A ROLE MODEL, and since we deal with the youth we should limit the theory and focus more on making the kids have fun so that they won’t get tired from a lecture, and also have time to relax and play. The UNOSDP Youth Leadership Camp was great, we all did our best in being part of the camp and to have more fun, I learnt a lot and it was really helpful to go to the camp and I will be starting to implement my new coaching skills to the kids in my organisations.

I can still imagine the fun and great learning we had, in my community I will be starting with my new coaching style and see how the kids and the community members react to it and my experiences. I’m really looking forward to showing the Edendale community my new skills, and also to share my knowledge and skills I got from the camp because it nice to share with people your skills or talent so that you would get feedback and improve if needed or get positive response from the community in order to get more people involved.

I would just like to send a word of thanks to everyone who helped me to have a successful journey and a special thanks to the UNOSDP team for treating us all with respect and for including us in everything to make our two weeks exciting and very interesting.