Yuwa (http://www.yuwa-india.org/)
Three years ago, Pushpa Kumari Toppo from Hutub village started playing football at the age of twelve. In less than a year she was selected for the Indian National Team for girls after she and twelve teammates from Yuwa lifted Jharkhand’s state ranking from 20th to 4th in the nation. Her father, Jhabu Oraon, a mason at a local hospital, got news of her game when someone at the construction site brought a local newspaper with her photo on the front page. Pushpa is now one of the Indian girls’ team’s top players, scoring six goals in just five games at the Asian Football Confederation Cup in Sri Lanka where India was crowned Champions.
The Problem
Like all children, the girls had wanted to play when they were younger. One of the players, Sita shared, “When we were younger, we would go from house to house asking one of the boys for a ball, but no one would give us one. We once pooled some money to buy a ball but then that lost wind after a few weeks. Once or twice we even filled a plastic bag with trash and kicked it around”.
The situation started to change in 2008. Franz Gastler, a Boston University graduate from Minnesota who was teaching English at the village, saw the girls playing football and offered to coach them if they put together a team. Franz recalls, “So many of them would come barefoot in the early days ... they’d bring cow dung patties to burn and warm their feet during practice in the winters.” Franz told the girls that if they would save 400 rupees towards the cost of shoes, he would arrange for the other half so that they could buy shoes. “We wanted each player to own a pair of shoes, to own their own ball”, says Franz. Many of the girls readily put aside the lunch money to save for a pair of shoes.
The Intervention
So it began. Within a year, Franz, Anand and Hiralal (the first coaches) were organizing practices for more than a 100 girls and 40 boys daily. They started with a simple set of principles for coaching. Franz describes, “Our three rules of coaching have been: First rule, we want the players to have contact with the ball as much as possible. Second, no long lines. No standing around. Practice should be a lot of fun. We need to keep the players moving. Third, we believe in peer-to-peer coaching. We’re working towards a player-centric approach. Our coach is ‘a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage’. We’ve seen that a 12 year old girl is very effectively able to help a 10 year old to develop some capabilities.” Oral traditions come to the forefront on the playground.
To support operations, Franz and four friends from Minnesota, Stephen Peterson, Greg Deming, Erik Odland, and Tim Deming invested six lakhs and got to work. The team of four in the US work on tasks that can be managed remotely including fund-raising, legal affairs, accounting and the development of the coaching modules. They named the organization Yuwa (meaning “youth” in Hindi) and registered it as a charitable trust that would use a team sport like football to help young women to gain confidence.
The Challenges
In the beginning, many of the parents would not let their girls come to football practice. Later the team learnt from one of the players that the parents were worried that Franz might kidnap their daughters, and reasonably so given that sex trade is a huge problem in Jharkhand. Franz, Anand and Hiralal had to go from house to house assuring the parents that they wanted to teach their daughters football. Little by little, they managed to persuade the parents to let their daughters play.
Ladies First
If the parents had reservations about the girls playing football, the boys of the village certainly did not think the girls needed to be playing. In the first few months, some of the local boys would come to the field and behave in a rowdy manner and stop the girls from playing. Hiralal and Anand faced a lot of ridicule from the other young men who made fun of them for coaching girls in football. It took some time for Hiralal and Anand to persuade the boys to support the practice.
Slowly the sentiments changed. The boy’s and the girl’s teams started to practice against each other. Sunita and Kalamati, two of the girls, started coaching the boy’s team. The girls began going to tournaments organized across the state and the boys accompanied them to cheer them on. If you attend practice now, you may well hear the coaches reinforce values of respect like telling the boys not to kick the girls on the knee when they play together. “There’s now a very nice camaraderie between the boys and the girls’ teams of the kind I used to have with the girls who were in my judo teams” says Franz.
Self-esteem
The practices have now been happening for the past three years. The girls gain greater gender equity, camaraderie, and confidence. One of the players, Kusum said, “Before no one really looked at us. So we didn’t bother to clean and bathe. We used to wear the same torn dress every day. Now it is different.” Now the girls, dressed in tee-shirts and pants in every colour, could easily be Nike’s next brand ambassadors. They get a huge amount of attention. Their daily practices have become a social ground for an assortment of spectators from the village, and their tournaments draw upwards of 800 viewers. Neil Vassar, one of the donors who visited Yuwa noted, “The girls have a good light in their eyes ... I love to see people learn that it is worth the risk to believe in themselves.” Henry Ford’s adage “whether you think you can or can’t, you are right” comes alive here in Hutup.
Fellowship
The Yuwa House, a three room “pakka makan”, is buzzing with girls in the evening post practice. Dinner is rarely a solitary affair. The washing machine, an early purchase of the Yuwa team to reduce the workload of the girls, is churning away with all the clothes from practice. When an intern is in town, English classes are held for the girls. Otherwise, the girls resort to dinner and Saas bahu and Sasural Genda Phool on TV. Franz recently bought a Dr. Seuss i-pad application that has temporarily diverted the girl’s attention from the TV to i-pad’s disguised English lessons. The younger girls repeat along with Dr. Seuss:
“Have no fear!”, said the cat.
I will not let you fall.
I will hold you up high
As I stand on a ball
Franz speaks of the TV shows like He-man that he loved as a child, and the effort remains to bring action heroes to the action heroes.
Back to School
One final outcome of the girls playing football has been an increase in their school attendance. The coaches have now been tracking each of the player’s school attendance in addition to football attendance. School attendance has shot up for the girls who play football. As any athlete instinctively knows, physical agility has implications for mental agility. Plato recognized it ages ago when he noted that “The purpose of the two established types of education (mental and physical) is not, as some suppose, to deal one with the mind and the other with the body. I think that perhaps the main aim of both is to train the mind” (The Republic).
The Organization
Yuwa is an early-stage ‘access’ organization that Alexis de Tocqueville best defined as a “great link between minds”. Whether you think of a physical-link company like FedEx or a web-link company like Google, these organizations help individuals access each other through two stages - individuals are first given an address or identity (for instance, 1 Race Course Drive or pushpakumari@gmail.com) and then they are connected to each other through physical infrastructure (planes, trains, trucks) or web infrastructure (laptops, cables, telecom towers). Similarly in Yuwa’s case, each player is defined by her most natural abilities as a Defender, Goalkeeper, Forward, Striker et al. This becomes her identity. Kalawati is the Goalkeeper. Pushpa is the Forward. The game, the team, the daily practice, given its unifying construct, becomes the great link between the girls. What Yuwa shares in common with Google and FedEx is an understanding of the fundamentals. A person needs an identity, an address, an understanding of the joy of ownership that then becomes the foundation upon which she can connect with others.
At Yuwa, the word “equity” is afforded its dual meaning of ownership (of one’s abilities) and equality (as a member of the team). Psychologists have for more than a decade now been asserting the same principle with a different vocabulary. Renowned psychologist, Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, has demonstrated in his work with millions of children that “when a child faces a new task, it often seems very daunting. [Parents and educators need to] use small, achievable steps to grade the challenges wherever possible – starting with a level she can easily control” (The Optimistic Child). In Hutup, a team sports is a platform that the girls can naturally control. “The girls’ entire lives require athleticism whether or not they play football. They are carrying giant loads of wood, working in the rice fields, running after their animals, and doing housework, in addition to walking tens of kilometres to and from school” explains Franz. The mental and physical endurance required of the girls in their daily routine (full of repetition and hard work) makes them formidable sportswomen. Once a girl develops the optimism that her positive action will imply positive outcome, she starts to seek accomplishment in other arenas like school. The rest follows.
Last year, Yuwa won the Nike GAMECHANGERS grant to build a football pitch, spectator seating, community room, and enterprise area. The next steps for Yuwa include acquiring a football field on which they can build a stadium where young men and women from across the country can be coached and then return to coach others in their villages – so as to accomplish the first stated goal of coaching a million girls in football.
