Photo courtesy of Cherie Miot-Abbanat
By Kim Constantinesco
In rural Haiti, there’s a precarious region where girls’ soccer games draw an entire community; sometimes a bigger turnout, in fact, than boys’ games. Men and women travel from near and far to cheer for girls who have lavish footwork and sparkling competitive spirits. It’s not how Haiti usually does soccer.
“The girls love it. It gives them attention. It gives them status. It shows what women can do,” Haiti Projects CEO and M.I.T professor Cherie Miot-Abbanat said. “They’re not just people who fetch the water, or watch the kids, or have the kids. They’re out there competing against other teams.”
Fond de Blanc is located on Haiti’s southern peninsula, about 60 miles from Port au Prince, but it can take over four hours to travel there by car.
It’s an entire world away, and although girls’ soccer is popular, it’s a patriarchal society, where men have significantly more opportunities than women.
The main town of Sainton has a population of about 10,000. Nearly 80 percent of its people don’t finish fifth grade. Most rely on subsistence level farming, with high unemployment. Haitian women are 20 percent more likely to be illiterate than men, with a male literacy level of about 64 percent, and a female literacy rate of only 57 percent. Many girls drop out of school because they become pregnant. And of the female-headed households, 60 percent live in extreme poverty.
That’s why 20 years ago, Haiti Projects entered the region to empower women and drive them toward self-sufficiency. The organization provides opportunities for jobs, education, and health care at their family clinic. They’ve become the second largest employer in an area where over 40,000 people live without electricity.
The soccer club is an offshoot of their library program. Sure, it’s a great way to foster teamwork and get girls moving, but the sport is really a vehicle to transport health education messages and cultivate life skills.
The club warms up before practice. Photo courtesy of Cherie Miot-Abbanat
In an area that regards family planning as something a woman shouldn’t start until after she has her first child, and in a place where people believe that menstruating girls shouldn’t walk on cold floors, health education is a pressing need in order to help women become leaders in their community.
Futbol for Everyone
Fond de Blanc’s soccer program is three years old, and has about 40 players ranging in ages from 8 to 28 years old. Many of those who join come from one of the area’s six different primary or secondary schools. Three paid coaches, one team cook, and a host of volunteer referees, ball boys, and community nurses help give the team its firepower.
“To actually have girls playing, it blows people’s minds,” Miot-Abbanat said. “People wonder what can the girls do? How do they know how to do that? They’re super competitive. They don’t play with shin guards [in informal games], and some of them can play barefoot. They can hold their own…We want the the girls to see how to break a mold, see how to do something different, and realize that they’re capable and powerful.”
The team practices twice a week with Haiti Projects providing clean drinking water and healthy snacks, a vital offering considering one-third of the country is food insecure. Once a player has been consistent with the program for three weeks, she receives a pair of cleats, a t-shirt, and a sports bra. The girls play against other girls teams in Haiti, and compete in tournaments, with the next big one coming this July in Fond de Blanc, the regions first girl’s soccer tournament.
The big piece to the program, however, is health care and health education. It’s an important component in an area that views sexual health as 1950s America did. A ‘You don’t need to know that’ notion in a predominantly Catholic society coupled with women who don’t know how to discuss the issue with younger generations is what makes education so necessary.
“Girls don’t really understand why they have a period,” Miot-Abbanat said. “We’re trying to do a lot of work around menstrual health. We’re trying to get girls to understand what a period is, what you do, and what it means. The same thing with sex. They don’t know what any of these things are. When they start to have relationships with boys, they’re vulnerable. The last three years, we haven’t had any pregnancies on our soccer team. That’s fantastic because that bucks the national trend, where girls are getting pregnant before the age of 19. We can talk about family planning til we’re blue in the face, but if we don’t get to these girls before they start having their period, then we’ve already sort of lost the game.”
On top of menstruation and sex, the girls in the soccer club receive monthly education pertaining to hygiene, nutrition, and HIV, too.
The Power of One Woman
There would be no girls’ soccer club in Fond de Blanc without Haiti Projects, and there would be no Haiti Projects without retired travel nurse, Sarah Hackett.
In 1992, Hackett, who lived in Massachusetts at the time, served as a volunteer nurse with the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation. She was captivated by the people and the country itself, which sits only 700 miles from the U.S. coast. How could a place so close to the U.S. have the highest mortality rates and lowest literacy rates in the hemisphere, she wondered?
Two years later, Hackett started a family planning clinic to help pull people out of poverty. Then, getting to the root of the problem, she launched the Artisanat Cooperative in 1996 to bring employment opportunities to women in the community.
Today, the program she pioneered gives life-saving income to over 100 women in the area who work to support their families. And the health clinic has served over 5,000 patients to date.
Getting the girls used to contact on the field. Photo courtesy of Cherie Miot-Abbanat
A ‘Maker’ That Can Make Her
The country still has a long way to go, but with soccer gaining steam among girls, the playing field has a good shot at leveling out in the most important area — off the field.
The Kellogg Foundation has provided funding to help Haiti Projects build a state-of-the-art Maker Library in Fond de Blanc.
“That Maker space will have different equipment to make anything. You can make goals, you can make houses, you can connect with different parts of the world, too, thanks to its technology” Miot-Abbanat said.
The soccer program will eventually be able to take part in distance learning at the hands of coaches from all over the world. They’ll have the opportunity to watch professional women’s teams play on a screen. They’ll gain knowledge and inspiration from a form of traveling that doesn’t require stepping outside of their homeland.
The girls of the Haiti Projects’ soccer club could very well be the game changers their country needs. They’re the ones deciding who they are and what they want. And that’s a powerful force, one that can send any ball into the back of a net.
Follow the Fond de Blanc girls’ soccer program on Facebook.
