My

Story

Mayron

“My name is Mayron, I come from the region of Ocana in Norte Santander. Ocana is a city surrounded by forests with many cocaine plantations. As a result, there are a lot of armed forces and illegal activities all around: The different militant groups fight each other, because all of them want to gain control over the region and the cocaine plantations. This is one of the reasons why there are so many internally displaced people, in addition to the many refugees who come across the border from Venezuela. And those are the kids that I am working with.

My biggest dream is to change their perspective. The children live in such a violent environment that all they do is playing war themselves. They are running around with sticks and pretend it is a gun. When I was a child, I got involved in these games too. Everything was about war and violence. But I wanted to change this. So, I started to take the kids to football training sessions and became a volunteer coach without any formal education, spending all my salary for training material. Through sport, I gave the children an alternative to playing war and showed them how much more they could learn from being on the pitch and playing football instead.

The Young Coach Education has impacted me as a coach a lot. Now, when I coach, it is not only about going to the pitch, doing the training session, and being done once the training is over. It is different now, because the interaction with the kids and my influence on them goes beyond the pitch. I can see the development of every child that participates in my training. When they first come, their behavior is shaped by their violent experiences. But through football and what I have learnt during the Young Coach Education I can teach them values like empathy, responsibility, discipline, and honesty. The children learn these values in the game and start to represent them not only on the pitch but also in the community. They start to apply them in different aspects of their lives and to reflect on them.

My biggest satisfaction as a coach is to be able to take these kids away from the violence and to make them better persons not only for the game of football but also for society. So that they can contribute to the establishment of a more peaceful coexistence and community.”