ZIMBABWE'S Young Warriors will tomorrow step up their preparations for the African Under-17 Championships qualifiers with an international friendly clash against Malawi at Rufaro (kick-off 1pm).
The Young Warriors will face Reunion in an Under-17 Championships first round, first leg qualifier at Rufaro on August 29.
Coach Rodwell Dhlakama, eager to guide the Young Warriors to the Under-17 Championships finals in Algeria next January, is not taking chances ahead of his teenagers' showdown with Reunion and has been in camp with his side in the last two weeks.
Dhlakama, with a proud record in which he has lost only once in 22 international matches in charge of the national youth team, has assembled a 30-member squad, which will be trimmed in the final week of preparations.
Their preparations for the clash against Reunion received a major boost when Zifa arranged an international friendly with Malawi, which will give the majority of Dhlakama's teenagers a chance to feel Rufaro's artificial turf.
The 2009 edition of the African Under-17 Championships will be staged on artificial turf in Algeria.
Zifa chief executive Henrietta Rushwaya said yesterday they had arranged that the Young Warriors against Malawi international friendly would be the main curtain raiser to the high profile ABC Super 8 semi-final showdown between Dynamos and CAPS United at Rufaro.
Rushwaya also paid tribute to Dhlakama and the "Friends of the Young Warriors" whom she said had taken the initiative to ensure that the Under-17 squad's preparations got underway as Zifa had been hard pressed for resources for a longer training camp.
"They have been in camp at Churchill High School for the past two weeks and we would like to thank the coach and his technical department and especially the Friends of the Young Warriors, people like Newsome Mutema, Calvin Nyazema and Patrick Mutesva as well as parents of children who are in camp for the efforts they have made in assisting to cater for the team.
"They put in place resources for the welfare of the players and paid them their transport refunds and they have been sourcing for assistance from various companies to ensure everything is smooth in camp.
"Unlike some people who want Zifa to pay them all the time, these people have gone out of their way to assist the association.
"We slotted the game as the main curtain raiser to the ABC Cup game between Dynamos and CAPS United so there will be more entertainment for the fans," Rushwaya said.
The Zifa boss added that the Young Warriors against Reunion qualifier had been brought forward to August 29 following a decision by the Confederation of African Football to stage Dynamos' massive African Champions League Group A encounter against Al Ahly on August 30.
Dynamos traditionally play their home matches on a Sunday but with the Champions League matches being televised across the continent, DeMbare have had to work within Caf's television programme.
It is the changes in the DeMbare game that forced Zifa to stage the Young Warriors match a day earlier.
But before they take on Reunion, the Young Warriors will tomorrow get a chance to gauge their state of preparedness when they take on Malawi.
This is the second time that Dhlakama's teenage boys will be involved in an international ahead of their clash with Reunion.
Dhlakama took his team to Pietermaritzburg in June where they beat South Africa 2-1 in the FNB Challenge match that was also used to mark the official unveiling of the artificial turf that was installed at the FNB Wadley Stadium in the city.
The Young Warriors mentor, who is also the assistant coach of Premiership leaders Monomotapa, was hopeful that his charges would benefit from playing before an expected bumper crowd at Rufaro.
"We want them to get used to playing before a big crowd because it is always different from playing before an empty stadium. I would also want the supporters to be patient with the youngsters because they are bound to make mistakes and for most them it will be their first time to play on the artificial turf," Dhlakama said.
Dhlakama revealed that he was likely to rest some of the stars of the Young Warriors' trip to South Africa and try new combinations tomorrow.
"It is important that we widen our selection base. There are some members of the team whom we already know about but we still want to have a variety of combinations and this is the chance to try some of the players we have had in camp.
"So some of those who played in South Africa might be rested.
"It is also my hope that the youngsters will also learn some valuable lessons from their brothers who will play in the main match of the day".
The decision to rest some of his regulars could mean the Young Warriors might take to the battle against Malawi without the likes of skipper Archieford Gutu of CAPS FC, Eagles midfielder Brian Katsaruware, defender Taurai Charakupa and strikers Matthew Rusike, Ray Lunga and Ntokozo Tshuma.
Saturday, 23 August 2008
Doctors without borders
Philanthropy Fredericton physicians join team working to save the lives of Malawian children
The retired physician is engrossed in thoughts of a place he has never been, an African country in crisis, ridden with abject poverty and rampant disease. In a few short weeks, Hart is set to arrive with six other Atlantic Canadian medical staff in a remote village on the shores of Lake Malawi, where they will spend two weeks living among the local people, teaching and healing.
Central to their work will be an effort to help control the raging malaria that kills an estimated one million African children each year. Millions more have been orphaned as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis wipe out generations. Together, these are known as the 'Big Three' killers.
"In that society, the middle-aged people are mostly gone," says Hart, his face gentle, but his voice rough, gritty. "Grandmothers sometimes raise children from three or four of their own children, different families.
"Children don't only lose their parents. They lose all the other people who would be an influence when they're growing up - schoolteachers, leaders, everyone in society that helps you grow up."
Hart has done similar outreach work in Jamaica, but this will be his first time in Malawi.
In a population of 11 million, an estimated one million Malawian children are orphaned or homeless. Nearly a third of the country's young adult population is infected with HIV, and the average life expectancy is around 30, according to Lifeline Malawi, a Canadian aid organization.
Malaria is especially pervasive in the villages along Lake Malawi, where the air is alive with a deadly blanket of disease-carrying mosquitoes. Pregnant women and children are the most vulnerable. At night, the danger intensifies as the masses of insects thicken.
On Aug. 30, Hart and colleague Mark Messenger, a pediatrician who is also set to make the journey to Malawi, plan to set up shop at the Fredericton Market to collect money to purchase mosquito nets. Hart's team will distribute the nets, simple devices that hang from the ceiling and enshroud the bed, along with vital prevention information to Malawian families.
The cost of one net is $5, and because they would be purchased in Malawi, the local economy would also benefit, Hart says. Between the Fredericton fundraiser and a similar drive in P.E.I., the team hopes to raise $10,000 to purchase 2,000 nets.
"One net could save the life of a child," Hart says.
To Westerners, the problems in that region of the world seem overwhelming, almost unsolvable, he notes - but every bit of help is critical.
"Poor health care, poor water supply, poor nutrition, all related to poverty - some people look at the enormity of those problems and say they need big answers," says Hart, who recently received the Order of New Brunswick for his work in promoting public health issues.
"But my honest sense is the answer will come by everybody contributing small amounts; $5, $10, $20. I think the world is recognizing that it should happen, and there is enough will in the world to do it.
"There will come a time when we can't sit back and wait for the United Nations and Bill Gates. It's going to be individuals who solve it."
When he arrives in Malawi, Hart plans to work closely alongside team leader Hendrik (Hank) Visser, a doctor who has been practising in Crapaud, P.E.I., for more than two decades.
Visser, who has been to Malawi twice - once in 2005 and again last year - says many children in the region are severely anemic, suffering from chronic malaria, which destroys red blood cells. Another common type of the disease is cerebral malaria, in which parasites invade the brain, causing high fever, convulsions and potentially death, Visser says.
Though the team will bring its own medical equipment, members should be prepared for "very primitive" conditions in the makeshift clinics, Visser notes.
"You're basically examining patients in a clinic under a thatched roof and mud walls, built by villagers," he says, noting anywhere from 50 to 100 people a day typically stream through.
Visser recalls being deeply affected by a Malawian family he met in 2005, which spurred him to become more involved in the region's cause. A grandmother, whose own five children had died from AIDS, brought two grandchildren who were in her care to a local clinic. The two children were suffering from swollen glands, and after being tested for HIV, one was found to be positive.
"So there's this grandmother - five kids and their spouses all gone - looking after her grandchildren, and one's already infected with the AIDS virus," Visser says. "That really struck me. There's a whole middle generation that's gone from AIDS. The needs are great."
The team will work with Lifeline Malawi, a group founded by Calgary doctor Chris Brooks, whose first mission to the country was in the late 1990s and who now bases his regular operations out of Malawi. In addition, the team will be sponsored by the Evangelical Medical Aid Society (EMAS), based out of Stouffville, Ont.
Barbara Mikus, Lifeline Malawi's vice-president of Canadian operations, says about 70 staff working in two clinics see about 10,000 patients each month. The group, funded by grants, donations and charities, encourages volunteer teams to join them for short-term missions.
Mikus says the mosquito-net program will be beneficial not only in practical terms, but also as an awareness tool.
"Things we take for granted here, you can't take for granted there," Mikus notes. "A mosquito bite can be deadly."
EMAS sponsors two volunteer teams each year in Malawi, where malaria has become a "public health disaster," according to administration director Ellen Watson. Mosquito nets are the cheapest, simplest solution, she says.
"If every person in Africa was kept under a net, Africa would be able to get malaria under control," Watson adds.
Both Visser and Hart say the most rewarding aspect of missionary work is seeing the vital difference it makes in the lives of so many people, not only physically, but also spiritually.
"There are people who are hungry and poor and need support, but they also want to be guided, to be accepted, and to know other people care for them," Hart says. "That's the most valuable thing you can do for them."
Visser points to the close connection he has developed with patients through his work in the developing world.
"They learn from us and we learn from them. You see how people who have so little are so deeply grateful, and truly happy."
Returning to Western society after experiencing the severe third-world conditions in Malawi was a "major reverse culture shock," Visser says.
"There's such extravagance here, and yet people are so quick to complain."
The team plans to document its two-week journey, which starts on Sept. 12, through a live blog. It is available online at http://malawiteam.blogspot.com.
Good news from Africa
Giles Foden enjoys the tales of a clever teenager growing up in Malawi
There are many amusing moments in this memoir of a clever Malawian's journey from resonant backwaters of the developing world - Zomba, Kasungu, Nkhotakhota - to the over-developed world of conceptual art, as practised in London and other metropolises. The best has to be at the end of a paragraph describing crossing from Malawi into Zimbabwe via Mozambique: "There was nobody at the Mozambican immigration office except a boy with one leg selling roasted birds and a sweaty, chubby man who walked on to the bus and collected our passports together with a fee . . . When he was finished with them, we headed to Zimbabwe where we were greeted by a black-and-white portrait of Robert Mugabe and a notice that read, 'If you are not happy with us, wait until you get to Heathrow.'"
The poster legend is a typical Mugabe gambit: the wisecrack of the street thug. Kambalu grew up under a more subtly insidious (and far less bloody) dictator, life president of Malawi, Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda. So did I, until I was 14, and it's a pleasure to have one's memory sparked by so much well-observed detail. It is rare to see it, and the reason why is intimately bound with the repressive culture Kambalu describes.
Malawi seldom features in books. The material covered in The Jive Talker, which charts the ordinary life of a modern Malawian teenager in country and city from his own perspective, has never before been explored. There was a brief efflorescence of Malawian literature in the 1960s through writers such as David Rubadiri, after which genuine culture was smothered by Banda for most of three decades.
The only writer of substance the country has produced is the great Jack Mapanje, but his output was circumscribed by his being imprisoned by Banda for most of the period. Artistic activity was frowned on by the former elder of the Kirk (Banda did his training in Scotland), who only wanted to see graven images of himself, preferably on the printed dresses of the ululating women he liked to have dancing round.
Largely because he was courting Britain and (as it often seemed at the time) its proxy, apartheid South Africa, Banda would never have tolerated such bare-faced cheek at the former colonial power as indicated by the Zimbabwean poster. Kambalu sees the consequences of this political and cultural cringe when he gets a scholarship to the prestigious Kamuzu Academy (the so-called Eton of Africa) but he has to fight hard to get there.
This is in spite of some advantages. His father is a hospital manager and in some of his posts - the more rural ones, where Kambalu senior, aka the Jive Talker, is in charge - this means the family has plenty of food. The jive he talks is a blend of various philosophers, scientists and classics, as held in a large double-fronted bookshelf christened "The Diptych". The scholarship winner and future artist will learn much at this shrine, not least self-confidence, since Nietzsche's collected works bend quite a few shelves of The Diptych.
Kambalu needs to be a young Superman, since the path to Parnassus is a thorny one. He struggles with poverty, his father's drinking, and the rejection of a boy whose main interests are fashion and Michael Jackson, in a country where miniskirts and long hair are banned. His flamboyant attitude and quick tongue lead to difficulties with both boys (not wanted) and girls (wanted but unattainable).
Malawi is beset by a triadic scourge of evangelical Christianity, the Hitler Youth-like "young pioneers" of Banda, and worsening poverty - but all these are as nothing to the scourge of Aids. Misunderstood and misdiagnosed, the pestilence sweeps across the country in the mid-1980s, claiming Kambalu's father, mother and six other family members. The scenes describing the death of his father, the former fount of all knowledge to whom antipathy is later developed, are riven with contradictory passion.
This happens while the son is at Kamuzu, learning Latin and imbibing from expatriate teachers a hobbled sort of great education, which his Nietzschean vigour undercuts. It is through Nietzsche that Kambalu develops the art concept of the Holy Ball - an ordinary football, or sometimes a Malawian rag football, stuck over with pages from the Bible - which he associates with sun worship and freedom from oppressive models of thought and being.
A sense of cleanly freedom - of "exercise" and "exorcise" - permeates this enjoyable book. Football playing and fun are presented as the necessary correctives to Banda's Presbyterian gloom and the grimness of disease. The revolving heart of The Jive Talker, the Holy Ball idea will be Kambalu's passport to Amsterdam and then the London art scene, where he continues to kick charmingly about, the living embodiment of good news from Africa.
· Giles Foden is working on Turbulence, a novel about the D-Day weather forecast.
There are many amusing moments in this memoir of a clever Malawian's journey from resonant backwaters of the developing world - Zomba, Kasungu, Nkhotakhota - to the over-developed world of conceptual art, as practised in London and other metropolises. The best has to be at the end of a paragraph describing crossing from Malawi into Zimbabwe via Mozambique: "There was nobody at the Mozambican immigration office except a boy with one leg selling roasted birds and a sweaty, chubby man who walked on to the bus and collected our passports together with a fee . . . When he was finished with them, we headed to Zimbabwe where we were greeted by a black-and-white portrait of Robert Mugabe and a notice that read, 'If you are not happy with us, wait until you get to Heathrow.'"
The poster legend is a typical Mugabe gambit: the wisecrack of the street thug. Kambalu grew up under a more subtly insidious (and far less bloody) dictator, life president of Malawi, Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda. So did I, until I was 14, and it's a pleasure to have one's memory sparked by so much well-observed detail. It is rare to see it, and the reason why is intimately bound with the repressive culture Kambalu describes.
Malawi seldom features in books. The material covered in The Jive Talker, which charts the ordinary life of a modern Malawian teenager in country and city from his own perspective, has never before been explored. There was a brief efflorescence of Malawian literature in the 1960s through writers such as David Rubadiri, after which genuine culture was smothered by Banda for most of three decades.
The only writer of substance the country has produced is the great Jack Mapanje, but his output was circumscribed by his being imprisoned by Banda for most of the period. Artistic activity was frowned on by the former elder of the Kirk (Banda did his training in Scotland), who only wanted to see graven images of himself, preferably on the printed dresses of the ululating women he liked to have dancing round.
Largely because he was courting Britain and (as it often seemed at the time) its proxy, apartheid South Africa, Banda would never have tolerated such bare-faced cheek at the former colonial power as indicated by the Zimbabwean poster. Kambalu sees the consequences of this political and cultural cringe when he gets a scholarship to the prestigious Kamuzu Academy (the so-called Eton of Africa) but he has to fight hard to get there.
This is in spite of some advantages. His father is a hospital manager and in some of his posts - the more rural ones, where Kambalu senior, aka the Jive Talker, is in charge - this means the family has plenty of food. The jive he talks is a blend of various philosophers, scientists and classics, as held in a large double-fronted bookshelf christened "The Diptych". The scholarship winner and future artist will learn much at this shrine, not least self-confidence, since Nietzsche's collected works bend quite a few shelves of The Diptych.
Kambalu needs to be a young Superman, since the path to Parnassus is a thorny one. He struggles with poverty, his father's drinking, and the rejection of a boy whose main interests are fashion and Michael Jackson, in a country where miniskirts and long hair are banned. His flamboyant attitude and quick tongue lead to difficulties with both boys (not wanted) and girls (wanted but unattainable).
Malawi is beset by a triadic scourge of evangelical Christianity, the Hitler Youth-like "young pioneers" of Banda, and worsening poverty - but all these are as nothing to the scourge of Aids. Misunderstood and misdiagnosed, the pestilence sweeps across the country in the mid-1980s, claiming Kambalu's father, mother and six other family members. The scenes describing the death of his father, the former fount of all knowledge to whom antipathy is later developed, are riven with contradictory passion.
This happens while the son is at Kamuzu, learning Latin and imbibing from expatriate teachers a hobbled sort of great education, which his Nietzschean vigour undercuts. It is through Nietzsche that Kambalu develops the art concept of the Holy Ball - an ordinary football, or sometimes a Malawian rag football, stuck over with pages from the Bible - which he associates with sun worship and freedom from oppressive models of thought and being.
A sense of cleanly freedom - of "exercise" and "exorcise" - permeates this enjoyable book. Football playing and fun are presented as the necessary correctives to Banda's Presbyterian gloom and the grimness of disease. The revolving heart of The Jive Talker, the Holy Ball idea will be Kambalu's passport to Amsterdam and then the London art scene, where he continues to kick charmingly about, the living embodiment of good news from Africa.
· Giles Foden is working on Turbulence, a novel about the D-Day weather forecast.
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