On soccer and slums

Francis Mugoya, CEO at Watoto Wasoka (Kampala, Uganda), tells an inspirational story of how soccer has transformed the lives of children from slums

To Kisenyi, as a slum, coach Seeka is famous for his slum outreaches in the famous ghetto, but is even more famous for his passion for soccer. He has been doing soccer in the slums for the past decade, and has regularly assembled teams that have taken part in the Watoto Wasoka tournaments since 2013.

The scene is pathetic…the shelter is skirted by open trenches packed with stagnant…any heavy downpour would mean the end of the world for many a family.

Street and slum kids get up every other morning with the same goal: to go out wandering the favelas to make ends meet, to please their quest for food and their thirst for sniffing. Later on in life, age graduates them to smoking marijuana for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

Meanwhile, coach Seeka, as he’s popularly known will not let this in his class. To the children, his welcome is a brutally honest reminder of what you have come for. He disarms them upon arrival, throws the bottles away in to the trench and keeps their sack of undeclared luggage under his safe custody.

Coach Seeka’s model is one that forms the baseline of the chain of our work. He preaches the gospel of returning to their homes, and Uncle Kevin occasionally helps with resettling some. The rest he interests into channelling their energies into soccer, and then Watoto Wasoka comes in like has been the case for the past few years. In his sermons, he occasionally throws in success stories of previous street and slum kids who have broken free of the street and the addiction, either returning to their homes or ending up playing soccer.

For many, soccer is simply a hobby. And yes, it’s basically 11 oblivious persons up against another bunch of 11 chasing a small sphere seemingly for no good reason! On many, if not most, occasions, a miniature critic is running along blowing a Fox – 40 whistle on each occurrence of a fault. To coach Seeka, much to the congruence of our values at Watoto Wasoka, soccer enshrines discipline, the rule of law, and banishes all hopelessness.