When he visited Project Medishare one day to see about getting a prosthetic, someone there asked whether he played soccer. “I can’t play soccer with just one leg,” he responded. But he quickly accepted an offer to join Team Zaryen. Amputee soccer was part of what Project Medishare calls its Return to Sport Initiative for Haitians who lost limbs in the earthquake.
Soon, Pierre was playing several times a week.
One of the lessons amputee soccer taught Pierre and his teammates was when to put their prosthesis aside in favor of crutches.
They happily do so while playing but gratefully put them back on after the game.
The word “zaryen” is Creole for tarantula, a spider that can grow back a leg. When a team member has a prosthesis, “they grow another leg,” said Cedieu Fortilus, the coach and co-founder.
Pierre would miss a lot of balls at first as he tried to kick them with his phantom right leg. When that happened, he said, he’d tell the coach, “I’m sorry. I’m a righty.”
These days, Pierre is one of more than 20 Haitian men, women and children who have started to play soccer with Team Zaryen in Haiti, dramatically changing the way people with disabilities are viewed in their country. When they wear their uniform shirts, people cheer for them in the streets, said Robert Gailey, director of rehabilitation at Project Medishare’s base in Miami.
On Saturday, Haiti’s president, Michel Martelly, came to watch them play, Gailey said.
“Kids see them play, and they’re heroes,” Miller said.
With each game, the team gets closer to its dream of playing in the 2012 Amputee Football World Cup, the most elite of international competitions for disabled soccer players. Playing the U.S. team Tuesday was just a warm-up.
This week, though, teaching military veterans that they, too, can do something they thought they never could after losing a leg was the team’s primary goal. Bennett, the amputee game’s founder, watched Tuesday’s game and clinic with a sense of pride: Team Zaryen changed veterans’ lives. Now, he said, “they know they can play the fastest one-legged sport in the world.”
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