Team South Africa in Alexandra at the Footbal for Hope Festival 2010

My name is Sithule Biyela. I am 27 years old, I am staying at Lamontville and I was born there. I am working for WhizzKids United and I started last year. I am running a project which started last year February that project is from FIFA FOOTBALL FOR HOPE and I was given a chance to be in charge of it. The way it started I invited two schools which was Bantuvukani School from Lamonville and Sekelani high school from uMlazi -- there were close to 300 kids then. I made a tournament where they played 6 aside mix gender and there were people who were helping me in terms of selecting those kids. The first 20 kids were selected and I had to trim it down to the number of 10 kids. We then gave them 10 statements where they had to choose the correct answers. The statements were about HIV/AIDS and the children had to answer true or false. We got the number to four kids who went to the FIFA FOOTBALL FOR HOPE Festival. Before they went to JHB I had to train them from February to June twice a week for two hours. I also prepared a traditional cultural song.

While we preparing there were lot of challenges I was facing there because it wasn’t easy to working with different kids from different teams especially when they misbehave and I had to discipline them. That was the worse part for me, because some of them are spoiled, especially the girls. Those four kids, 2 girls and 2 boys were making up part of the the South African team. We went to JHB by June when we got there we met another organisation which is Altus Sport - they were mixed with us to be a South African team. There were many teams with different languages and the challenge for me and for the kids as well was playing with people who speak French, the second was that these kids had to record everything that they were doing each and everyday having interviews daily and being followed by the film crew. I think it was difficult for them, because it was their first time away from home and in front of a camera. The most I enjoyed was to be given an opportunity to be a young leader in JHB and also to work as a mediator in different games having someone who is translating French to English etc to support me. I also made new friends who I am still in contact with. We are still working on a documentary, but with the girls only. I am training them to be Peer Educators. I meet them twice a week teaching them how to do Life skills, using our 6 session manual since they will be the Peer Educators training 10 kids. This will be a big part of the documentary which will be out soon.