Soccer Players Come Home With Opened Eyes

From Their Burdened Peers in South Africa, D.C. Girls Learn Life Lessons: 'This Is Not Fair'

Clare Greenberg's opportunity to make a difference in South Africa arrived as an unsolicited page of white notebook paper folded up and passed to her on the day before she was to leave Port Elizabeth.

"Dear Princess," it began in tiny, carefully printed black ink. "I'm fine everything perfect." Surely this is meant for someone else, Clare, 16, thought. But she read on and learned that this girl, 15, had been raped several months before and become infected with HIV. She had told only one other person. Could she talk to Clare?

What, thought Clare, can I possibly do to help?

This was one of several tough questions Clare and 10 other teenage girls, all members of a Washington area soccer team, would ask themselves over the course of a two-week visit to South Africa. The trip, which ended a little over a week ago, allowed the players to teach their game to girls from two poor communities at the bottom of the continent and to learn about the AIDS epidemic that is ravaging sub-Saharan Africa.

Teachers and parents frequently remark on what a wonder it is to see young people begin to develop a sense of empathy and altruism after the me-ness of childhood. Adolescence can jump-start a lifetime of social and moral awareness; that's why educators and others are so supportive of community service requirements in high school.

What can go unnoticed is how hard the internal work can be for those adolescents, particularly if it involves kids their own age.

In South Africa, the schedule of the D.C. Blast was not all work, of course. The girls, accompanied by four chaperones, were treated to a day-long safari, shopped along Port Elizabeth's glitzy waterfront and dined on springbok, ostrich and other native delicacies. They rode around in a comfortable bus listening to Lauryn Hill and A Tribe Called Quest, and took hundreds of digital pictures.

But 24 hours after they had returned to Washington, what they wanted to talk about most was not the elephant herd that surrounded their bus or the lion cubs they held. It was handing out 1,000 hot dogs to squatters' families, joining dozens of little boys in a field to kick around a rubber ball the size of a walnut, and sharing secrets with African girls their age. They had caught glimpses of what was really important in life, and they knew it, even if they didn't know what to do with what they had learned.

Their favorite place was Richmond, a dusty speck of a town with high unemployment between coastal Port Elizabeth and huge Johannesburg. Under the umbrella of a program started two years ago by St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Poolesville, the girls stayed two days to deliver food and play with local kids. Joanna Meyer-Glitzenstein, 16, recalled riding into the town and thinking, "Oh, my God, there's nothing here. The streets are empty. Where are all the people?"

She didn't have to wait long to find out. Within minutes of the team's arrival, dozens of kids showed up and were immediately attracted to her, pulling her into their group and inviting her to play pickup rugby. Dozens more appeared, and "pretty soon, I had 80 friends who all knew my name," she recalled.

"Their houses looked like, well, big doghouses," is all she could think of by way of description. "They didn't have anything. I kept thinking, 'This is not fair. How is this happening?' "

In Port Elizabeth, a seaport of 1 million people, Blast members were struck by contrasts of race and economics. Each morning, on the way to school where they took HIV instruction with African girls, they drove through a white neighborhood they said resembled the wealthy Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. "It had this huge, modern high school," Molly Brune, 16, said, "bigger and nicer" than Montgomery Blair, the high school she attends.

Their lesson took place in an old brick school in a black township where, one of the students proudly pointed out, all 54 students in her class had seats -- albeit old, wooden and frequently in disrepair.

At the end of such days, it was easy to feel overwhelmed. One evening, riding back to the lodge where the team stayed, Molly sat in the bus, her cheek against the cold window. Out of the blue, she began to obsess over people who irritated her back home.

"Why am I doing this?" she asked herself, and she realized it was her way of coping with the conditions she and her friends were seeing -- the inequalities she couldn't erase, and the equanimity, even grace, with which the South African kids seemed to deal with the hardships.

She and her teammates pondered such things after their return home July 2, scarfing down pastries, granola bars, cheese, fruit and juice at Molly's kitchen table in Takoma Park.

Rachel Starnes, 16, said that when she got home she walked into her kitchen, "opened the refrigerator and just looked at all the food," remembering all those kids in Richmond waiting in line for hot dogs. "It definitely made me not want to stuff my face."

Anna Rassman, 16, added, "We were talking on the plane coming back about a 4-year-old girl who carries her 2-year-old sister around on her back. Kids that age here are in preschool, playing with blocks, eating candy. She has her sister on her back, that's what she's doing. It's intense."

"In the U.S. you think, 'What do we value? Money, power and possessions,' Joanna said later, sitting in her family's spacious, light-filled living room. "You ask the girls in South Africa and they say, 'My family, my friends and my health.' "

Some of the girls are already thinking about what they can do next year to continue their involvement. They have talked with their coach, Ian Oliver, who works overseas for the Academy for Educational Development and organized this year's trip, about raising money to bring South African girls here for a visit. A couple of them are thinking about trying to help again in Richmond.

Now home, they can see they made at least a small difference in some girls' lives. Brooke Benton, 16, recalled that on the last day of camp in Port Elizabeth, a girl handed her a tiny spiral notebook with poems she had written and this message: "American girls you are caring and kind. We love you. Nobody can replace you."

That same day, the girl who wrote the "Dear Princess" note found Clare and asked to talk. Around the side of the school, the two sat on some steps together.

The girl blamed herself for only pleading with the rapist to stop, for not fighting him off with more force. She said she was an orphan and was being helped by a local counselor to press charges against the young man, who was still roaming the township. The case would be going to court soon, she told Clare.

Clare had seen older boys in South Africa hit on girls inappropriately in public. She had heard that some men believed the way to get rid of AIDS was to have sex with a virgin, and learned that the HIV/AIDS infection rate in South Africa was highest among young women. Even if this assailant was sentenced to jail, what kind of life would this girl have -- and what could Clare possibly say to her?

"I told her she was brave, incredible and strong," Clare said. "She wasn't going to let this one bad thing ruin her entire life. She was going to come out even stronger than she was. I wanted her to know that as much as she wanted me to support her, she had just changed my life as well."

The girl listened, took down Clare's address and started to walk away.

"Wait, come back!" Clare cried. The girl turned around and the two embraced.

"It was a long hug," Clare recalled. ·

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