Pickup Games
August 8, 2002 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Photograph by Francesco Broli
Every other month, about 500 young people fan out across Kibera, a densely populated slum in Nairobi, Kenya, to pick up and haul away trash from open sewers. The youths are among the 4,000 members of a soccer league organized by Rye Barcott, a 2001 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Salim Mohamed, a Nairobi native. Participation in the league has helped teach the youths leadership skills and improved relationships among the many ethnic groups who live in the slum.
The soccer players, who range in age from 10 to 17, must perform the trash pickup before playing in that month’s tournament. Each team, one quarter of whose members must be from a different ethnic group than the majority of the team, has a captain responsible for recruiting players for games and the cleanup effort. Older players also help coach teams and referee games.
The soccer league, which is modeled on a similar program in a neighboring slum, represents the flagship program of Carolina for Kibera, a nonprofit organization that Mr. Barcott started after spending a summer research fellowship studying the youth culture, the ethnic conflicts, and the effectiveness of local nonprofit groups in Kibera. The organization has also provided seed money for a nursery school in the slum, and volunteers for the group have delivered donated medical supplies to a local clinic, to which the group gives rent-free space in its building there.
Mr. Barcott, who is now a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, raised the $25,000 needed to keep the soccer league going this year from individuals, the Ford Foundation, and the World Bank, and Mr. Mohamed manages the program day to day. In addition, league participants elect a 16-person council of their peers who have a say in how the program is run. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gives Carolina for Kibera office space rent free.
Here, Mr. Barcott shares a laugh with an 11-year-old soccer-league player before the semifinals of the first tournament in Kibera last summer.
