Haitian Girls Soccer Team
Tom here, I’ve had a number of people who have e-mailed me and said something along the lines of:
“Tom, I saw the video about the Haitian girl’s soccer team and it really got to me. But I went to show it to my ______ (insert husband, wife, friends) and it says it’s not available. What’s up?”
We are trying to get through to ESPN to see if we can get a digital copy of the video. But I was also able to find a written copy of the story at their website, and I’ve reproduced part of it below. At the end of what I’ve put up is a link to their site where you can read the whole thing.
There are some of “us” who are dreaming big dreams right now. If you’d like to help, e-mail me at Tom I’d like to help!
At a minimum, don’t forget to continue to pray for these girls and the situation in Haiti.
Thanks,
Tom
ESPN RISE high school girls soccer – ESPN RISE
Alexandra Coby cries all the time. She sits in her tiny home — an 8×8 dwelling with dirt floors and no windows — and thinks about how she ruined her teammates’ lives. She didn’t, of course. But it’s only been a few weeks since the Haiti Under-17 girls’ soccer team was eliminated from the CONCACAF U17 tournament. They took three straight losses in which Alexandra, the goalkeeper, was unable to defend the 12 goals that sent them home. The pain of loss is intense.
Alexandra Coby collapsed in tears after Haiti’s tournament-opening loss to the U.S. on March 10.For Alexandra and her teammates, those games weren’t just about soccer. Pursuing a junior World Cup berth meant not yet having to face the destruction waiting for them in Haiti. Losing means that now the girls have returned to their island home, and they must live every day with the results of January’s devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake.
Alexandra’s neighborhood feels apocalyptic. It was one of the poorest slums on the planet before the earthquake. Violent gangs roam the streets. There is no running water, almost no electricity. Raw sewage flows by in steaming rivers of filth and stink.
Madeline is consoled by a neighbor. Both parents and her sister died in the quake. She feels there is no future here and thinks it’s her fault. She’s the goalkeeper. The team was counting on her. Never mind that her teammates didn’t score a single goal. The memory of those games runs through her head, over and over. “I’m always thinking about it,” she says. “I cry when I think about my future that was wasted.”
And without the tournament to focus on, she also begins to replay the awful day of the quake in her mind. On Jan. 12, the earth began shaking during practice. The national stadium cracked, and the girls hit the ground and prayed. Protected by the open space of their soccer fields, they had no idea that just outside the stadium walls, Port-au-Prince was crumbling in a cloud of brown dust.
Starting goalkeeper Madeline Delice lost both of her parents and her sister that day. Most of the other girls lost their homes. When the shaking stopped and that brown cloud settled, they found they’d lost just about everything — except one another.
As the country fell apart, the team stayed together. The soccer federations
of the Dominican Republic and Panama opened their doors and their hearts to the girls, offering shelter, support and training facilities. Living and practicing in those other nations these past three months, the team stared slack jawed at shiny shopping malls, so different from what they knew in Haiti.
They’d meet as a team every day, trying to put words to the emotions they all felt. “I cried a lot because I didn’t understand,” team captain Hayana Jean-François says. “I didn’t know what to do. I saw so many things. I thought it was the end of the world.”
The tournament took on outsize stakes. If they could get a win, maybe even a tie, the team would advance to the Under-17 World Cup in Trinidad and Tobago and remain in the safe embrace of fancy hotels and endless buffet lines. If this were a Hollywood movie, they’d win.
But this is real life.
Read the rest of the story on ESPN’s Site by clicking here……
Technorati Tags: Haiti, Orphans, Soccer Team, God’s Littlest Angels
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