ASUNCIÓN – As ever, waiting to greet us on our arrival in baking Asunción was Julio Gonzalez, the coordinator of Inter Campus Paraguay and former Vicenza player whose career was sadly cut short after a serious car accident in 2005.
Inter Campus has been working in Paraguay since 2008, with centres at the Cateura dump and in the Zeballos Cué area of the city. The former sees 160 boys and girls participate in sporting activity every single day. Alongside their parents, these youngsters live on the dump and even earn their living from it, gathering up rubbish and sorting it for resale. Yet after the recent floods, some families were forced to move their dwellings out onto the road, building makeshift wooden shacks for shelter.
The Zeballos Cué centre, meanwhile, welcomes both children from the local area and orphans living in the Aldea SOS orphanage. Our pitch – with goals painted in Inter black and blue and brand-new nets after this most recent of visits – is bumpy and uneven all over. During the rainy season, the pitch floods and becomes unplayable in areas. These boggy areas soon attract pigs, chickens, dogs and mosquitoes.
Back in Cateura we clear away the worst of the rubbish from the pitch before training. Yet as the children pound the ground, once-buried rubbish emerges from the sand: plastic bottles, scraps of metal, even parts of house roofs spirited away on the wind.
Despite it all, local trainer Raimundo and his assistant Fermin display great tenacity and optimism in the way their dedicate their time to the sporting and personal development of these kids who, instead of going to work on the dump once they finish school, come to the pitch to kick a ball about, have fun and learn thanks to rules and games specially created for them. Suddenly, our modest pitch starts to feel like a small miracle in the midst of such poverty.
Over in Zeballos Cué the instructors are Reinaldo, Celso and Kevin. Now a 17-year-old lad, back in 2009 Kevin came to Figline Val D’Arno in Tuscany to take part in the Inter Campus World Cup alongside another 300 kids from all over the world. Even then, Kevin stood out for his kind heart, so it was with great pride that we watched him pour his efforts into helping the younger children now, showing that same desire, determination and positivity that so impressed us six years ago.
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