Chancy offers street gang another chance

As the sun rose on Friday morning, to some 40 Blantyre City minibus touts, vendors and street children, the day symbolised another rising dream of a football career.

Barefoot, and most of them in shorts only, they scampered around on a bumpy clay Sunnyside ground pitch in Blantyre, energetically kicking and miskicking the ball, yelling and shouting as they yearn for the ball.

“Life on the street is tough and we want to see if football can offer us an alternative. Our dream is to develop into a top team that can take on giants and make a name for ourselves,” minibus tout Peter Matope said.

His red eyes, fresh and old scars all over his face tell a story of life on Malawi streets.

Watching the street gang train, the basic rule of passing and supporting did not seem to apply here. They passed and collided into each other, forcing the patient referee and coach Chancy ‘Viny’ Gondwe to stop the proceedings over and over again.

“It is simple like this,” the former Malawi football national team star Gondwe told the men in their early 20s. “When you pass the ball, there is no need to follow it. Just go in space.”

Such is Gondwe’s influence that he is managing to handle the gang whereas Malawi Government’s order to rid the country’s streets of street kids by this year failed spectacularly.

Using the police to get kids off the street is nearly impossible in a country where most people live below the poverty line with unemployment skyrocketing.

Situational Analysis of Street Children report launched in April in Lilongwe by director of child affairs McNight Kalanda estimates that 38 percent of children survive on begging, 19 percent on touting and 11 percent on vending and a combination of other businesses.

“We want to encourage every Malawian not to give out alms to street kids so that they should be frustrated and in the end may just return home,” Kalanda was quoted as saying by Malawi press recently.

The first step towards getting the street children off the streets is to look at them just like any other human being, Gondwe suggests.

“The biggest challenge they face is rejection on the streets. They do whatever they do in self-defence. They have no means of making ends meet and there is no one to defend them,” the former tough-tackling midfielder noted after the training sessions, which run on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

With just a ball, a bumpy clay pitch and his wealth of underutilised football talent garnered at Bata Bullets, Mamelodi Sundowns and Wits University in South Africa, Gondwe has managed to lure a group of over 40 youngsters drawn from the Blantyre streets into forming a football team called Pentecostal Street Giants for Christ.

From being a bad boy of Malawi football who messed up his promising career through well-chronicled temptations of beer, Gondwe is now pursuing a diploma in theology at Assemblies of God School of Theology in Lilongwe where he returns next month for the last semester of his final year.

The obvious challenge facing Gondwe’s football initiative is that it has no funding and the team has no basic equipment; hence, keeping it together might be problematic in the absence of incentives.

“After graduation, I will continue running the team, but ultimately my objective is to form street football teams in Zomba, Mzuzu and Lilongwe. We want to use football to transform the lives of these people,” said Gondwe.

The team’s leader Peter Kachapila can see massive transformation in their lives, noting that not too long ago bringing them together was problematic as they could break into swearing, fighting and yelling.

“They used to come so drunk and fight all the time, but there is improvement in their lives,” Kachapila noted.

One can only hope this change is for real.