It’s all about football. Just football. No big deal. And yet it’s about so much more. About self-confidence, strength, recognition, hope. Bend it like Ballack. Of course, it’s also about fun and about a piece of normality. But then what is normal when you’re a young woman, 17 years old and live in Kabul? For Zhela today that also means wearing shoes with studs and training with her 17 teammates. Zhela is standing in goal for Afghanistan’s national women’s football team. “Many people in Afghanistan still think football’s not for girls,” she tells the journalist from Süddeutsche Zeitung in January during her stay at a training camp in Germany, which was financed by the Federal Foreign Office. “Some also say women shouldn’t drive cars, shouldn’t study, shouldn’t work. But we have to prove that we can do that.”
Today, 400 girls and young women play soccer in Afghanistan – mainly in the capital city, Kabul. “It makes me really happy when I see how passionately they play,” says Klaus Stärk. The German football expert and trainer is supporting the Afghanistan Football Federation to rebuild its structures together with former Afghan national player Ali Askar Lali. He is working on behalf of the Federal Foreign Office under the auspices of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB). Football work in Afghanistan is a central project of Germany’s international sport assistance. This form of sporting cooperation began in 1961 and is supported by the Federal Foreign Office. Meanwhile over 1,300 long-term projects, which last several years, and short-term projects, which last two to four weeks, have been implemented in more than 100 countries and in almost all sports, although football and athletics usually play the main roles.
In May, Klaus Stärk and the Afghanistan men’s national team qualified to play in the Challenge Cup of the Asian Football Confederation. “Normally, top-level sport is not a task of international sport assistance,” says Katrin Merkel of the DOSB. However, exceptionally, the situation is different in the case of Afghanistan: “This work simply radiates out into society,” says the head of the international affairs department, “and brings people together.” Otherwise, however, the projects focus on mass sport, on transferring know-how about modern training methods, on advice about the organization of sport. Especially in young democracies and developing countries, sport can do a lot to improve civil society structures.
Sometimes sport can even open up entirely new perspectives on life – for example, in disabled sport, which is not something that can be taken for granted everywhere in the world. In the last two years, 29-year-old sport scientist Romy Mäuslein has done truly pioneering work in Cambodia as part of international sport assistance – in the field of wheelchair sport. She experienced how disabled men and women who had had little self-assurance, who had even been ashamed of their disadvantage, developed confidence and a new zest for life as a result of sport in the wheelchair. “Many of them even earned respect in their daily lives as a result. It was great seeing that,” she says. The project has now come to an end, but the work is being continued by the coaches that Romy Mäuslein trained. That’s precisely how it’s meant to be.
Cooperation with the German sport experts is very much in demand in many countries. That’s why Katrin Merkel of the DOSB is very pleased that the annual budget for Federal Foreign Office international sport assistance in 2008 has been almost doubled to 4.85 million euros with the support of Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. She can now implement many project applications that would otherwise have been rejected. This year, special emphasis is being placed on Africa: long-term projects in Tanzania and Rwanda are already running and this year short-term projects in the most varied sports will be implemented in some 20 additional countries.
That’s also why Björn Wangemann has just travelled to Namibia. Not very long ago, the track and field athlete was passing on his knowledge in Peru. He also spent two years working in Uruguay. Among other places. For 35 years now, Wangemann has been a tireless traveller in the cause of sport. He is one of the most experienced of the roughly 30 highly qualified physical education specialists that make up the expert pool for international project work. In Uruguay alone, the former multi-event athlete and development director of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) trained more than a thousand coaches as part of the Mini-Atletismo programme. This is a playful form of athletics for children that also teaches them how to transform old bicycle tyres, banana boxes or soft drinks bottles into sports equipment with a little imagination and paint. “Every additional child that becomes involved in meaningful activity through sport is one child less on the road to social insecurity,” says Wangemann, explaining what motivates him in his work.
Work with children and young people is also important for Sebastian Allende from Flores in Uruguay. The 30-year-old athlete is one of ten scholarship-holders from Africa, Latin America and Asia currently completing a one-year study programme at the German Athletics Federation (DLV) training school in Mainz. This invitation to Germany is also an area of international sport assistance in which the Federal Foreign Office is engaged. As well as Mainz, the University of Leipzig and the training school of the German Football Association (DFB) also offer seminars for physical education teachers and coaches from developing countries. Following a four-month crash course in German, a packed schedule awaits the scholarship-holders in Mainz – it includes subjects from the psychology of sport and training theory to sports medicine and practical athletics exercises. The programme ends with the exam for the coaching diploma. “It’s a great opportunity for us here. I’ve learnt so much,” says Sebastian Allende. “And in addition to that I’ve now got friends in India, Senegal and Indonesia.” It’s just sport. But it’s a very big deal indeed.
