INDEPTH: A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE
Right to Play
CBC News Online | February 13, 2004
Reporter: Margo McDiarmid | From The National Feb. 16, 2004
The Orochinga refugee camp in southern Uganda is home to more than 4,000 people. About a thousand of them are children. It's a place where life is hard and not much fun, especially if you're a kid. That's where the Canadians come in, and not just any Canadians, but some who know a thing or two about sports. They're with an organization whose work is play.
It's a long road from a continent of heat and poverty to the land of winter and wealth. Steve Podborski, one of Canada's most famous downhill skiers, is about to find out just how far that journey really is. Podborski is heading to Uganda, a world away from where he has spent most of his life.
Podborski was one of Canada's Crazy Canucks who captured the ski world's imagination in the 1970s and '80s, young daredevils whose high-speed, breakneck style made them heroes of the World Cup ski circuit.
Podborski was one of the most successful of them all, winning a bronze medal at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980. He's the only North American male skier to ever win the World Cup for downhill skiing.
Podborski retired 20 years ago, but he's still immersed in sports through his business and his role in Vancouver's successful Olympic bid.
He also volunteers his time and image to a Canadian humanitarian group called Right To Play. It uses sport and play to help disadvantaged kids around the world.
"As a ski racer, many people gave a lot of themselves for me to be successful. I know that nobody could have possibly paid for what I received. So I've got to give back. It's as simple as that," Podborski says.
Podborski is travelling with Right To Play volunteers and fellow Olympian Charmaine Crooks. She's an Olympic silver medallist, a Canadian track champion, and member of the International Olympic Committee.
These kids at the Orochinga refugee settlement are some of the thousand children who go to school at the refugee settlement. Most of the younger ones were born in this camp after their families fled the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
In spite of their cheerful welcome for the Canadian visitors, life is not great here. Refugee tents have been replaced by more permanent mud huts. They're provided with basic food by aid agencies. But more than 4,000 people live in permanent limbo and crushing boredom. That's where Right To Play comes in. Its volunteers work with kids, teaching them sports and games and skills to cope with their lives. Right To Play has programs like this in 19 countries around the world. It's based on the increasingly popular philosophy that sport can help ease the effects of war.
Shannon Duff is a volunteer from Saskatoon. She's worked in the Orochinga Camp for six months.
"It takes the children's mind off of any trauma that they've been through," Duff says. "They laugh. They play. They have fun with each other. They have fun with us. So really I think it's the smiles, it's the happiness. It keeps them busy, as well, which keeps them out of trouble."
It keeps them out of trouble by keeping them involved, like this soccer game between two refugee camps.
Right To Play provides the equipment and the training, and it uses sports events like this to pass on health messages to young kids about HIV/AIDS. But it can be as basic as providing skipping ropes and playgrounds, simple tools for play.
"It gives them something other than the rebuilding that they have, the basic needs, the necessity, food, the water," Duff says. "You need something else to occupy your mind and to be involved with, to be active with, and just to be passionate about. I think that this gives them something."
The refugee volunteers are at the very heart of what Right To Play is trying to accomplish. They're trained as coaches, taught to run the sport programs long after the Canadians have left.
Today the volunteer coaches have a big challenge: give their Canadian visitors a workout, a taste of the typical games kids play in the settlement.
In an African field, Steve Podborski, who spent much of his life competing, learns something about sport he never realized in Canada.
"It's much more powerful than I thought it would be," Podborski says. "I thought sport was about playing. But it's not about playing. It's about something greater than that. I remember when I lost that game. The girl put the cloth behind me. She was looking at me. She was trying to give me the signal. Get it, you crazy dude! I put the thing behind your back! Where do we connect? Where do Steve and this young black kid from Uganda get together? It's in the middle of a playing field and it's nowhere else."
Even sports can't bridge every cultural gap.
"Hello, my name is Podborski, and I used to be... I am an Olympian," he says. "Do you know what snow is?… I went very fast, faster than the cars can go on the road and ended up being an Olympian and being the best in the world."
Some things just don't translate. Podborski, the Crazy Canuck and incorrigible show-off wins a few new fans anyway.
"We're just looking at the zebras in the game park here, which is pretty much a first for yours truly here," he says.
Podborski is heading back to Canada with some souvenir pictures and a new perspective on sport.
"What I realize, that there's this total universal thing of playing together. Like, let's go, let's get in a big circle and we'll play together. We'll learn things together. It's going to be fun," he says.
Perhaps that's the simplest lesson of all, to come from these warm hills in Africa, that even people from opposite sides of the world can play on the same team, if only they're given a chance.
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CUSO tracks volunteers from:
AFS Interculture Canada
Canadian Crossroads International.
Canada World Youth.
Centre for International Studies and Cooperation
Canadian Executive Service Organization (CESO).
CUSO.
Oxfam Québec.
SUCO - Solidarité Union Coopération
VSO Voluntary Services Overseas Canada
World University Service of Canada (WUSC).
CUSO Statement
Collectively, our organizations send or receive more than 3,000 volunteers each year and remain in touch with more than 60,000 returned volunteers. These figures include significant numbers of volunteers from the South, but by and large they represent Canadians so concerned about the disparity between life here and life in poorer countries that they are willing to give up weeks, months or even years of their time to improve the world. Through our network of members and volunteers, we reach into almost every community in Canada, coast to coast to coast. Ours is a real, concrete presence for Canada around the world, often the only Canadian presence outside of capitals, or even in some entire countries.
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