So after a fantastic, packed first weekend in Buenos Aires, it was time to begin with what I was really here for: 5 weeks of football coaching. However, a torrential storm meant I didn’t get further than the underground tube station before all was called off, I would have to wait another 24 hours. By the Tuesday, and with two full days of recovery, I was ready to get out there and see what the city had in store for me. I was set to do two different projects, one on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the other on Mondays and Wednesdays, with Friday being my day off. I must say the Tuesday group soon became my favourite, however I thoroughly enjoyed them both.
For my first two weeks, I was accompanied by another volunteer, Henry, to my project on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was quite thankful for this as it took me a while to master the labyrinth that is public transport in BA. One underground, and one overground train later, I had arrived at the training area, which was a lot nicer than expected as it was made of artificial grass in a posh looking park area with guards. But the area itself was next to the ´Villa 31´, BA´s largest shanty town/slum, and this was where most of the boys came from. On the first sight of it, I was shocked. The buildings were like the ones I had seen in the World Cup footage of Brazil, just it was flat and sprawling instead of being up a hill. It was simply a flat favela, housing thousands upon thousands of immigrants and Argentina´s poorest. The majority of these ´houses´ didn’t have roofs or doors and everything was there to see from the train. I feared the worst. This area was nothing like I had seen in Peru, as yes I had seen poverty, but not on this scale and vastness. What shocked me was that just on the other side of it, 5 minutes away, was Recoleta, Buenos Aires´ most exclusive neighborhood. When we arrived, we were greeted by a very welcoming guy who was the coach. I was then introduced to the kids and 5 minutes later we were mid 5v5. This project was very laid back, as it was more focused on just playing than practicing drills. However I did not mind this whatsoever as it meant I could focus on speaking Spanish to the children. Well, that was if I could. Coming from Peru I felt pretty confident in my Spanish, but I have already elaborated on the initial difficulty of comprehending the Argentinean dialect. As these children were from such a poor area, you could see this in the way they spoke. Every sentence containing street and slang words I hadn’t a hope of understanding, and Henry who also spoke Spanish assured me you would get used to it. The children were of a mixture of ages, from 7 to 16, and there were 2 Peruvian brothers of the older end of the age scale who I immediately warmed to (maybe due to the fact I was there in my Peru football top). We immediately started talking and it was nice to have again some Spanish I could fully understand. I then began to bombard them with questions as I had never seen something like the Villa in person, and just wanted to know everything about what it was like on the inside. I returned home that night and immediately began to search it on the internet. This was not because I had any interested in entering, as I value my life, but it was a shock to see such a vast scale of poverty in such a central location of one of South America´s biggest cities. It lies there for all to see, surrounded only by a barbed wire fence. I learned the villa is entirely internally run, and police very very rarely, if not never enter. Most houses have water and electricity, illegally sourced, and it is almost like a city within a city. I don’t know why these areas interest me so much, perhaps because we don’t have anything like it in our society, and I cannot imagine how life is inside, but it saddened me speaking with one boy that he was scared to live inside it, and wanted to leave as soon as he possibly could. I could not imagine being brought up in an area where I was scared to leave the house, but this is what some of these children faced. And of course, bang in the middle of the Villa, lies a football pitch.
The Villa from the train
Anyway, back to the football. Over the next 5 weeks I bonded with all the children. We went to Boca, home of the iconic Boca Juniors and you could see how much of a big thing this was for them. We had Rest of the World (I captained of course) v Argentina, as many children of the villa and around were of other South American nationalities and I rapidly learned the importance of football in their lives. Some of the boys chose to go to school early just so they could finish and come to this project to play football, and I really saw it as a release, rather than just a leisure activity. After 5 weeks, I was sad to have to leave the guys, and I really do have a lasting memory of the place. As I have already learned, the people with the least are often the people who value these sort of things the most, but equally I valued every minute I had playing with them, but more so finding out about the lifestyle of a villa-dwelling Argentinean youth. For me, these boys are the ones with the biggest hearts, and the ones who least deserve to be brought up in such a poor area.
As I sooned learned, life isn´t fair, but that´s why we have football. A fantastic experience.
freddiestravels 