It all starts with a phone call. It’s funny how it works sometimes, but on one particular morning our phones rang here at the 90:00 office and we were introduced to Nancy Best. Nancy is from Southern California and lives right around the corner from our office in Anaheim. Her daughter Natalie is in the Peace Corps and lives in Togo, a country on the western coast of Africa more than 7,500 miles away.
Like so many countries in Africa, poverty and disease beset the Togolese people with daily hardships unimaginable in the United States. HIV ravages nearly 6% of the adult population and less than 30% of the female population is exposed to any sort of formal education. Natalie began her 27-month post in December 2006 working in the Girls Education and Empowerment Program. Living in a village of only 800 people, Natalie decided to try and give the girls she teaches an outlet to escape the hardships of their daily lives through the game of soccer.
On the first day that Natalie posted a sign up sheet for a team at the local school, 41 girls joined. It was the first team of its kind ever put together in the village, and while interest was obviously not going to be a problem, there were several other hurdles that Natalie just couldn’t overcome on her own.
On the first day of practice, of the 41 girls on the team, only 2 owned a pair of shoes. There were no uniforms or equipment to speak of in the village. Natalie, who has to travel 16 miles by bush taxi to get to the nearest computer with an internet connection, e-mailed her mother and told her about what she was trying to do, and Nancy decided to lend a helping hand.
Things weren’t exactly much easier for Nancy here in the states. After weeks of contacting various club organizations in search of equipment donations and finding no help, Nancy saw an ad in a local paper advertising soccer signups. She jumped on the leagues website to look for potential contacts to help her in the search and found 90:00 Soccer Magazine. Basically she was looking for some way to get the word out to a broader audience that may have been willing to donate equipment, even used. We decided to go one step further.
Immediately after hanging up the phone with Nancy we were on the phone with Puma. It took all of a half of a second for Puma to agree to help out, and after a few weeks of exchanging e-mails, we had a list of 41 shoe sizes to forward to Puma. The girls will be outfitted in the women’s v-Konstrukt II boots, all 41 of them!
While things may have started slowly for Natalie and Nancy, once the ball got rolling, everything started to come together. With brand new shoes for the entire team, the girls still needed uniforms.
Enter Alliance Soccer Club. While coordinating things with Puma, one of the first clubs that Nancy contacted in her search for gear got back to her with some good news.
Mike Deeney and the Alliance Soccer Club,
a U-17 girls team from El Cajon, CA, were switching sponsors and had a ton of unused jerseys, shorts and socks that he and the team would be happy to donate.
What started out as a search for some used soccer gear turned into so much more. The girls in Togo not only are outfitted with some hot new equipment, more importantly they gained a sister team in the Alliance Soccer Club. And thanks to a generous donation by Puma the girls will be knocking balls into the back of the net in style.
Knowing how hard it is just to phone and e-mail Natalie, we can only imagine bow long it might take for those boxes of equipment to get all the way to Togo. But with everything in the mail, there is a good chance that while you are sitting on your couch reading this story, a girl in a tiny village in Togo is opening a box with her first pair of shoes inside.
The driving force of youth soccer development in Southern California
