My

Story

Philbert

“I grew up in Arusha with my parents and my older brother. Both of my parents have since passed away. Access to education was a big challenge for me growing up. The organisation, Umoja Tanzania supported my education and now after my graduation I am working for them as a sport coordinator and IT trainer. Every Friday I hold a training session for the children, called sport and health. In our sessions we address important topics like HIV and malaria through different sports. Some other community coaches and I created a workbook to educate peer coaches and with that we want to broaden our reach and get more kids involved in our activities.

We are facing different challenges. The first one is to get the children active, so that they don’t just sit around in their spare time but instead to use their time thoughtfully. The second challenge is the role of the women in Tanzania. Women are not expected to play sports. Instead they should just concentrate on the domestic work. This is not an easy thing to change in the minds of the parents, as they think that sport is not good for girls to do. You can see this attitude in the training sessions too. The boys don’t want to play with girls. I can’t stop this immediately, but I think with time this is something we could change. I want to see both boys and girls participating in sports. Furthermore, before the Young Coach Education I had no experience in coaching children with disabilities. I didn’t know what I could do with them or how I should interact with them. However, after the education I had many ideas how to include them in my training sessions. Without this training I wouldn’t reach these kids, I wouldn’t have the knowledge of how to deal with them.

What helps me a lot from the education are the football drills we have learnt. I wrote them all down in a way that I understand and now I can just pick one for each training and I know exactly what I have to do when I start to organise the activity. I also improved in planning sessions. It is much more effective to write your thoughts down, to have a plan and not just go to a session and do some random exercises. It feels great to be a Young Coach and I love to train people and for them to go on and train other people too. In this way, knowledge gets passed on continuously.”