The Dynamic Stars Academy

The Dynamic Stars Academy lads watching the ball, wherever it goes

Central to this whole thing is football and I don't want to drift to far away from that. Football is what took me to the pitch in Chainda and it's what takes the children and the people of the compound there. It's how I met the coach, Mukuka, and  many others. It's how I got to know people and it's through football they have asked for help and I want to provide what I can whilst the fun lasts. In sometimes overwhelming poverty, football is often the most important thing in people's lives after their homes and families. Football is like the opposite of the poverty they are in. It gives dreams that can come true when the goals go in and at anytime of the day on the pitch you can here the sound of laughter and singing, feel the anguish of open goals missed and watch the goal scorers dancing. In a country and community rife with Aids, Malaria and other diseases, where the everyday adversary death is often more familiar than the means and medicines to stop it, football is life. It may be all make believe, but it does give people something to believe in and through it people feel alive. They live on the football pitch whereas off it they often have to find food for their families to eat each week. For the people of Chainda, football is fun and this fun can help them to survive. Goal Zambia's overriding objective, in short, is to have a lot of fun wherever possible and see what good can come from it.

The pitch

The Dynamic Stars are the first academy that I got to know and worked with in Lusaka and I hope that this partnership will continue develop. What appealed to me was the ideas and aspirations the organisation have for the future and the way that they use football  to allow the children and young adults a chance to live more healthily and avoid some of the specific dangers inherent in the environment, communities and society in which they exist.

One of the first tasks I undertook on my return to the UK from Zambia after my first visit was to translate and edit the academies governing document and produce this, with the help of some friends, into an accessible leaflet form including some photographs I had taken whilst out there. This was then shipped over to Lusaka to be distributed in the city. The text below is taken from the leaflet and illustrates, in the academies own words, the work they do, the motivation for it and the aspirations and objectives they have as a organisation for the, hopefully near, future.

About the Academy

We are a sporting academy, formed in May 2012, and named the Dynamic Stars Academy by a committee of ten local responsible adults. The academy is based in the Chainda compound of Lusaka and currently train and play on the football pitch in the Avondale area. We provide a safe environment with experienced coaches and responsible adult supervision for local children and young people from all backgrounds to participate in organised football activities. Many of the children, with little else to occupy them, find themselves missing school and becoming involved in anti-social and self-harmful behaviour.

The Dynamic Stars Academy is committed towards helping children fulfill their potential by attending school and expressing themselves positively through sport outside of school hours.

The committee discussed and agreed that football was an ideal activity to unite children and young people socially and develop their self-worth, promoting achievement through teamwork and hardwork.

Our Objectives   

• To provide a safe meeting place outside school hours for boys and girls
• To educate boys and girls on the dangers of HIV and Aids by inviting relevent experts to give talks, provide information and discuss issues with them
• To encourage boys and girls to attend school and sit end of grade tests
• To educate boys and girls in the dangers of early marraige
• To make young people aware of the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse
• To give young people access to well equipped training facilities and skilled coaching, and to encourage participation in sports at all leavels of skill and different age groups
• As role models, to encourage children to adopt and develop good behaviour and discipline in all areas of their lives
• To enable children to fulfill their sporting potential at personal, local national and international levels
• To promote Christian values by teaching the word of God everyday 

Warm up song and dance

We need your help

We need your help. We have a lot of children registered for and many more interested in the football teams but as a result we have a chronic shortage of equipment and space to train. We currently share the single football pitch at Chainda playing fields, in the Avondale area, with many other groups and children from the local schools and area. We need urgent help with transport costs, financial support and to provide basic training equipment and playing kit.

We are still growing and learning as an academy but in the future we hope to have our own building and land. We are also trying to raise money for our own team minibus.

As an academy we are dedicated to the future lives of the children in our area and were not formed for our own self-interest or gain. We appeal to you as individuals or organisations to help in any  way you feel you can, financially or otherwise. Whatever is given or donated will be accounted for in full because evrtything is naked in the eyes of God. 

Dynamic Stars in action - friendly match

Fancy a beer?

Shake Shake Maize beer

 The above is a discarded carton of maize beer, the local traditional brew of many of the Bantu tribes of southern Africa, this one called Shake Shake and colloquially known as that throughout Zambia.You see hundreds of discarded cartons in the storm ditches and drains lining the roads of Lusaka and anywhere else that rubbish accumulates. It is the cheapest and most accessible alcoholic drink for the poor and is sold by children at the side of the road and in the most basic of drinking establishments alongside a choice of maize or cane spirits in little plastic bottles made to look like classier glass ones.They can't be bought from supermarkets. Both taste, to  my palette, vile. Imagine if you are 16 again and are sick onto your clothes through your hands as the room the party is in spins around about you. You then wake up on the kitchen floor in the morning with the stale alcohol vomit odour of the night before. This is what it's like and the nearest to how I can describe the smell of warm Shake Shake. It is not, in my opinion, the nectar, of the gods. It remind me of an image I retain of a starving lone desert wolf turning his nose up and scampering off unfulfilled after sniffing the carcass of a long time dead, dried and rotting camel in the Sahara desert Libya. An acquired taste would be another description. and acquired it certainly is by a huge number of people.

If you were to visit a bar with say 4 of your pals, you would each buy one of these one litre cartons at about thirty pence each. After the first one was finished by passing it around the group, the bottom of the carton would be torn off to create a little beaker. This would subsequently be filled and passed round then refilled until all four were finished. The act is social and people talk a lot and laugh whilst drinking it. They tell each other stories, catch up on news of family and friends and reorganise the national football side into a thousand different formations. Women are often frowned upon for drinking this in a social situation dominated by men. The drink varies from 3%-5% proof with the stronger not necessarily the dearest. It shares a  gooey consistency and opaque appearance with vomit. I bought my first carton from a shack near Kampala market and sat down in the shade to drink it with my friend, Ben, outside the railway station, leaning on the council offices wall. He shook it in preparation more than I have ever seen anybody shake a drink ever and like someone who had done it before, until I had to ask him how long he was going to keep shaking it for. He said for a little bit more. I gave the significant rest to a man stood unloading things off the back of an articulated lorry, my friend explaining how, being a muzungu (white person), I hadn't yet acquired the taste. He looked right pleased and sat down, smiling, with his feet dangling over the side, to have a break. I also tried  cane spirit, tempered with pineapple to make it bearable. It didn't and had the opposite effect to the one intended. It tasted like something pineapple flavoured that you shouldn't drink and smelt the same, reminding me of sticking model planes together with Airfix glue. Students and drink shake shake and play pool out of the sun under makeshift roofs all round the city. The shake shake bars have crates and benches in shaded shacks behind scraps of hanging curtains and a bloke in charge of the crates. You have to drink them quickly otherwise they start to leak and if you've got one in your rucksack, you have to find a spot to sit it quickly before your bag  fills up with sick.

I don't know that much about the drinking habits of Zambians but it seems that a lot of people have the drinking habit or abstain totally and in line with the religious principles dominant in the country, particularly in the compounds.My friend, Kelly, will discuss the dangers of alcohol abuse with the academy children and doesn't drink at all. To many, drinking comes from the devil. There is not really the culture of social drinking. Zambians tend to go home in the evening and stay there. They rarely go out to meet in bars or go dancing. Their is only one nightclub and i haven't been to it yet. Most people in the compounds cannot afford to drink and eat so they avoid it or drinking quite quickly causes problems. People are known in the village, by whether they drink or not. I have been doing some preliminary work in Lusaka, with the blessing of FASAwareUk, a UK charity promoting information regarding Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. Through this I have learnt that, as with many things in Zambia, problem drinking of alcohol is likely to be higher than is officially recognised. Pregnant women, especially in rural areas are encouraged to drink in order to give their babies lighter skin and the problem in urban areas is certainly underrepresented. As with Aids, a blind eye is possibly turned, by those counting. Not everybody gets counted and in a way nobody really knows how many there are to count, unless, of course, it involves some commodity for the tourist or western world to see, like mating pairs of Black Rhinos or elephants.

Annie's Bar

If you have more money you can opt for a 60p bottle of Castle or deliciously cold in the heat of the summer, Mosi. They're more like the lagers you get here and all over the world. There is a little bar, without a name I can remember,  halfway along the main road to the village, with a tele' showing football or speakers blaring African chart music out on the radio or the apparently globally loved Daft Punk and high tables made of crates of beers, covered with easy wipe clean canvas cloths advertising Castle lager and dodgy bar stools, the seat bits of which are broken and just balance there on the welded frames. I used to stop off at this bar to get out of the heat, nurse an ice cold beer after rolling it around on my forehead for a while and write things down in my notebook both to the amusement of the locals who don't really do either. I met a lot of people here and spoke to them. They spoke to me. I learnt a lot of Nyanja in here, talked a lot of football, took a lot of phone numbers, arranged meetings and misunderstood a lot of English. It was a good simple bar and I felt welcome there quickly and look forward to going back. I got to know the owner, a woman of about my own age. The bar was managed by one of her sons, a kind man with a friendly face; hard drinkers at work, locals, China, the opportunist hard drinking young barber from the barbers shop outside the door and his cool kid friends and those, like me I suppose, just passing through - the clientele. She lived on a farm further away from the city and I visited there one day and ate cooked salted belly pork made by her daughter in some sort of sauce. I have photographs of it somewhere and of her impala hunting trophies up there on the wall of her porch.

For the camera...

Goal Zambia: Dynamic Stars Girls team training, Chainda pitch, Lusaka

News from the Bench

I've just heard from Kelly, the coach of the Dynamic Stars Academy. This is a great thing. Lusaka is a long way away, about 6000 miles and communication is difficult with those in the compound. Very few have access to the internet and even less their own computers or laptops. To send an email, money would need to be found to visit the village internet shop, a shack with a man and a computer. About 2 months ago I managed to arrange delivery of a laptop, bought with donated monies in England, to the academy. Since then Kelly has been attempting to raise the money towards an internet pay-as-you-go dongle thing - the only way to get online in the compound - and a month ago he contacted me to say he had raised half the K300 (£35) needed. Goal Zambia supplied the other half. I got an email from him yesterday on his new laptop through his new internet dongle and it was a great. we will work towards regular news bulletins about the academy and teams and see what happens and I hope that this will lead to some of the players contributing to their part of this blog thing.

There are about 130 children in the Dynamic Stars academy, maybe more,  who regularly meet and train on Chainda pitch. They are not the only academy and the space has to be shared with the whole community. This takes a lot of Zambian time and Zambian organisation, on top of the training sessions and time spent talking to the children about social and health issues. Kelly does enlist the help of three coaches from within other academies for adults but finds it difficult to find time to email me. Access to the internet is unreliable and the electricity supply, where it exists, erratic. Many households live without electricity or share supplies with neighbours when needed. At 35, Kelly passed his Grade 12 exams earlier this year but communicating in this language is challenging for him. English is taught in all schools and spoken in "formal" settings across most of urban Zambia, where people have been able to attend school. However, it is always a second language behind the vast number of Bantu tribal tongues and whilst we communicate in English, I am learning Nyanja but I have some way to go before I reach the level Kelly is at in English. Learning Nyanja is exciting and there is a whole new language evolving in the city of Lusaka that is a mishmash of English words, pure Nyanja, Bemba, urban Bantu slang seasoned with all the other tribal languages that people in the city and country speak. It's known colloquially as Urban Nyanja and the first phrasebook came out this year. I go it and it's good. I've written all over it. The only problem with a new language being made up is that everybody makes it up differently so that the word you learnt from a bloke at one end of the street is different for the person you first use it with at the other. It's fun though. Written English is more difficult for Kelly to undertake and every email is a tremendous effort. Nyanja, the prominent tribal Bantu language in central south Zambia,  without a widely known standard written form, is rarely taught, and even frowned upon in schools so I hope that Kelly's contributions to this blog are of benefit to him too and perhaps the players who are unable to attend school. One academy member, Eric, loves writing and I want him to write some match reports if he can find the time in between playing football and writing about how to chat up the lasses. We will see.

Anyway, here's the latest news from the team bench of the Dynamic Stars Academy...

 

The Team bench

 

"hi steven am happy to see yo email u sent us on 8 th december it is nice to hear from u mate we have francis the top scorer in the previous cup games he was out standng amoung the big players even chainda bombers players they failed defeat us.am in town today from here il spik to erick,andrew  has scored in chrismas cup already and junior each 1goal mubita as well scored.tomorrow we are playing a big team at chainda  we must the game.all games are being played at chainda ground.tomorrow il send u email after game giving u the result.girls played last week a cup game organised by the americans we won books pens and soft balls for girls with calculaters i gave them to thoze who go to school.thank u for email."  (Kelly Mukuka - DSA Coach)

 

 Joel Simwanza in action against the Future Stars

The Zambian Flag

The Zambian Flag

So this is the Zambian flag then, for those readers who are at all interested, and as far as flags go, I quite like it. It's cheerful and it's colours seem to match the country. Some flags strike me as a bit crap although it does seem to fit in and seems evocative for the people of Zambia. You might like it or not, it doesn't really matter and i suppose I could have written about it before but I didn't and that probably doesn't matter either. Things are in no chronological order. This seems a good a point as ever. The first time i visited the country i was embarking on a new career in primary school teaching and had arranged, for experience, to work in two Lusaka primary schools. It was during teaching a class in the first, a school for children with, or orphaned through HIV/ Aids, that I learnt about the colours of the Zambian flag. I possibly learnt more at the school than the children I was supposed to be teaching, and i'll expand on that some other time. I taught them about slightly unimpressive wildlife in England and inadvertently, how to say words like "boat" in a Yorkshire accent. I overheard them arguing at play time about it and they were adamant that I didn't speak English; they did.  They taught me games and what to do when you find a poisonous toad, of which there are many  found. The Zambian tribes are suspicious of reptiles; they harbour bad spirits. 
Anyway, the flag, or the colours of it are as above seen fluttering down some street somewhere and the reasons for each are something like as follows:

• Green: Prety obvious really when you get there. A lot of plants grow very quickly in Zambia, during the rainy season, and they need them to, quite badly. If the rains fail, and they did in recent memory, a year in the 90's I think, and the country was a bit buggered. There is a fine and fragile line here. There is a lot of  wild bush where the elephants live. Giraffes and literally tonnes of hippos. There are literally about two and very precious as a result, balck rhinos. All their mates and ancestors have been wiped out someway or another.

• Orange: is for the seams of natural copper that are found in the north central and resulting main industrial  area of the country, the Copperbelt This, I believe, and all future rights to any more ever found has been sold to the Chinese. Copper ore also contains all the silver and gold in the country too and this was like a free gift with the copper. I'n no business man but the move doesn't strike me as the shrewdest.

• Black: this represents the Bantu people of southern Africa.

• Red: is the colour of the blood of the Bantu people that has been bled here and there in history, notably in the case of the Zambian flag, during the move towards independence in the second half of the last century. It wasn't the bloodiest of transitions but there were riots and people died. I don't know that much about it.

• Eagle: the Sea Eagle is the national bird of Zambia. Although there is no sea there are loads of Sea Eagles in the branches of the trees that line the Zambezi. That's where I've seen them. They sit up there looking like the national bird. I don't know anything more about the sea eagle and neither did anybody else in the class that I asked apart from them being brown feathers on the body with a white neck and head. People don't seem to get as excited as we do in this country about wildlife. It's not that they take it for granted, it's more like they just coexist peacefully with it. It's almost just there with them, or down the road. The regular victims of crocodile attacks don't though. Saying that, there is a zoo in Lusaka that I haven't been too, don't know who does and can't really get my head round but then there's a few things like that. It's true though.

A walk through Chainda Compound, Lusaka