Courtesy of Laureus Sport for Good Foundation we were able to invite Ms. Adri-Marie van Heerden from OASIS South Africa to perform training interventions and capacity building at GDM in Manica.

This intervention aimed to firstly, train Manican youths in Life Skills facilitation and secondly to fine-tune a context specific curriculum that would still be generic enough to implement in a variety of situations.

From 12 -19 April 09, GDM was turned into an energetic training hub with games, laughter, discussions and fun creating an inviting vibe where young and old learned together. The first part of the week saw the GDM A-Team trained in various Life Skills facilitation skills and the second part of the week entailed the players practically implementing what they learned with various groups of kids and junior teams.

The curriculum comprises of the following top ten Life Skills:

· Communication

· Teamwork

· Conflict Management

· Project Management

· Lifelong Learning

· Health & Safety

· Leadership

· Environmental Management

· Responsibility

· Creativity

All these skills are taught through the application of participatory games that are then used to facilitate reflection and dialogue, where youths learn mostly from one another and share their own knowledge and insights.

We were surprised to see the depth and perceptiveness of young kids, barely ten years old. As a twelve year-old boy mentioned:

“these games show us to work together, to think before we do things and not to get angry quickly”.

Tomas Soares (52) mentioned that these games do what should, but does not happen in many homes. A fitting last quote might be from Pingi Chigueda an A-Team player and u/14 coach:

“I am so proud of my kids, they play well, but today I saw that many of them even think of things I didn’t realize! If they are the future of GDM our club will still do marvelous things.”