News from Zambia

The beginning of a new shop, Chainda Compound

This is more like it, this is what I want to see. This is Kelly's shop, the Dynamic Star's Shop and this is exciting. It's a little bit of a dream.  This is what Goal Zambia is all about and this is what I want it to do. I don't hear from Kelly that much because the internet signal in the compound is intermittent and he's busy with the village kids with the football on the pitch. This is brilliant though and I know the building taking shape in the photographs is a result of a lot of hard work, planning, dedication and considerable expense. Goal Zambia has been able to assist with this financially and now there it is, standing there in all it's wood and metal frame glory at the side of the pitch in Chainda. It will be even better, as buildings are, when it has tarpaulin walls and a corrugated iron or grass roof and things below and between them to sell. I'm sure and trust that Kelly knows what this will be. He currently sell clothes from his home to raise finances but this will give him and the academy a base from which to operate from.

Kelly has a friend who cooks chips and sells them at the side of the road. She's a business woman. Self-sustainability is a difficult concept to promote in a community of extreme poverty and in a culture that is not always best equipped with the skills to obtain what western cultures promote within it. There is very little money for basic needs never mind to put aside for a rainy day or invest in anything past the end of the week or hunger. In Zambia sometimes both modernity and urbanisation have been forced upon a country without the preparatory cultural or economic history that allows this to function as in the west.

Goal Zambia does not want to throw kit and money at the academies and then bugger off but at the same time it's not to bothered about a legacy. It does want fun and to share what it can; money it raises, skills and equipment. When I see this framework for a shop, I sort of see fun, I can imagine it. I can hear it being built in the sun and heat by the lads in the academy and I can imagine the older members one day manning the till, so to speak, and haggling, laughing with the customers. I can smell the chips frying and watch the kids looking at the pink dyed popcorn for sale from the popcorn machine. The chips waiting there inexplicably to go cold before being sold (Zambians like their chips cold). I can picture the crowds with people standing around and the excitement of conversations, of offside arguments between them, of cheers at free kicks hitting the bar and half volleys going in off it. That bench there, behind Kelly, is the team bench and the gaze from it goes backwards and forwards all day long, following the ball.

I suppose Goal Zambia is about making things up to enable things happen that otherwise wouldn't. And happen, most importantly, in a Zambian way. This shop was Kelly's idea and that's the way it needs to be for the long term. For something that will last and not just come and go.Working with Kelly is a compromise on both sides. I have a have to raise money responsibly in this culture to spend in another culture I am unfamiliar with. I don't really know how money works in the compound except to say that it's different from here. A lot of trust is involved and this is built up differently in Zambia. Both myself and Kelly are learning to work together by our mistakes, misunderstandings and ultimate successes and understanding, however small, along the way. The rent, to the local market or council is about £40 a month and what you see in the pictures cost about £60 for the materials.

People have dreams over there on the football pitch. The kids dream of Messi, Katonga, Ronaldo and Bale and scoring the winner for the Chipolopolo national team in the Africa Cup of Nations. They play for the greatest teams in the world everyday and score the greatest goals, bamboozle the best defenders and suffer the harshest defeats. Goal celebrations are perfected. Kelly dreams of land for a football pitch just for the vulnerable children of the Dynamic Stars, he dreams of building, a kitchen to cook nshima and school where the kids, whose families can't afford the fees can get a basic education in life and death and a social club for afterwards. Goal Zambia hopes to be able to help, not with dreaming the dreams but in enabling the dreams dreamt to be built. The photographs are of little bits of dream, a framework there in the grass at the roadside behind the goal. Something like that anyway...it's not as far away as you might imagine.