Readers
of this journal and Relational Child & Youth
Care Practice (among others) will be increasinly
familiar with the refreshing and insightful writing of
Kiaris Gharabachi who has agreed to make a more
regular contribution to CYC-Online in the future.
We are very pleased to welcome him — Editors
CARE WORKERS
The Kandahar Soccer Club As far as I know, there is no such thing as the
Kandahar Soccer Club but I think there should be. In fact, I don’t think
there are any organized recreational or social gatherings targeting
children or youth in Kandahar; after all, it is a war zone. There are,
however, some adult soccer teams emerging all over Afghanistan,
including in Kandahar (see web sites below), and on at least one
occasion, the Canadian Armed Forces participated in a major soccer
tournament organized for school children
In Kandahar, children have not had the opportunity in quite some time to
wake up to a day of endless possibilities, a day of intermingling
between reality and fantasy, a day of playing hide and seek for the sake
of the game rather than for survival. Most have grown up with concepts
and materials that for us are news items, to be viewed and contemplated
in the comfort of our homes: landmines, suicide bombers, kidnappings,
and public beatings/executions. We are in the business of creating memories,
and kids in Kandahar are in desperate need of memories that don’t
involve bullets. In fact, the soccer club would be the context for
addressing trauma, in line with our profession’s focus on relational
practice, engagement and caring. Child and Youth Care is about bridging
cultures through connections. Afghan children and youth have
met many foreigners in recent years, but most, well intentioned as
they might be, have worn uniforms and carried guns. Imagine the
connections we might establish with kids given language issues and
very likely profoundly different ways of experiencing the world. A
challenge for us, to be sure, but within that challenge lays the
opportunity for connective work that transcends all preconceived
notions of what a child or youth ought to be like within such
connection. Self is important to us. Hopefully we
have learned, as a group of professionals, that we don’t have
answers or solutions to every child’s problems. What we have is an
interest in the Self of the child, and understanding of our own
Self, and the courage to be with a child and become ‘we’. In most of
our work environments, our courage is somewhat mitigated by the
policy context of our employers and by the bureaucratic directives
of the work place. In Kandahar, the only directive is to watch where
you step; beyond that, we can actually do child and youth work and
be child and youth workers. We care about children and youth. This
is particularly important, given that just about everyone non-Afghan
involved in Afghanistan cares primarily about security, geopolitics,
and burning up poppy fields to put a dent into the international
poppy trade. Sure, there is a lot of money being invested in
education in particular, but it still is very much a function of
‘greater’ interests. Child and Youth Workers are unencumbered by the
larger political and economic issues of the day. We simply care
about kids, and we want to be present with kids where they live. Last but certainly not least, we need
something new, something different. Our work places are not
what they used to be. Group homes, schools, hospitals, clinics and
custody facilities are heavily regulated, and notwithstanding some
really great conceptual thinking in our field, more and more we come
across the ‘bureaucratized Child and Youth Worker’; an individual who does what is
asked, reports well in a timely manner, and seeks better and
better-paying opportunities through her or his compliance with
agency expectations. This is a huge problem. Our discipline emerged
from the seemingly untenable position of being thrown together with
some very unique youngsters and being asked to make sure all goes
according to plan. It is from this chaotic and profoundly open-ended
proposition that we found ourselves as a group of professionals that
are different. It is from not knowing what to do that we found ways
of doing. And it is from this experience that we learned the
uselessness of control. We learned that there is no ‘us and them’,
we learned to listen carefully to everybody, colleagues and kids
alike, in the hope to be given a clue as to what to do next. Over
time, something happened, meant to make things better, but perhaps
having the opposite effect. We adopted boundaries, rules, policies
and procedures, point and level systems, behaviour management
techniques and the deeply entrenched desire to change/fix kids. We
improved our language to reflect on what we do, but we abandoned
that reflection in favour of confirmation of our value as
professionals. Let’s go to Kandahar and find out what we are made
of. Forget institutional rules and regulations (but do watch where
you step) and rediscover what it is like to be with kids in spaces
that are controlled by no one, that require a sense of fear to stay
healthy, and where worker and child, and worker and worker, have to
rely on each other to move from moment to moment. There are some practical challenges. The chances of
being blown up, shot or kidnapped are slightly elevated. It’s hard to
get there since there are no commercial flights from North America,
Europe or Africa (there are from some places in the Middle East, India
and Central Asia, albeit all to Kabul, not to Kandahar). And language
might be a bit of a problem, less in dealing with the kids and more so
in terms of living there every day. But surely those details shouldn’t
stop us. It hasn’t stopped a US citizen who is offering a soccer program
in partnership with the US Army. And the British Armed Forces are
themselves offering regular soccer matches for fun with kids they
encounter in their work. Both these activities take place in slightly
less volatile regions than Kandahar, emphasis on ‘slightly’.
http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-478/_nr-189/i.html
http://www.myafghan.com/news2.asp?id=671308238
http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/Feature_Story/2006/11/15_f_e.asp
Kiaras Gharabaghi
Soccer was the national sport of Afghanistan until the Taliban first
outlawed it, and then restricted it to men wearing full religious dress.
Women and children were prohibited from playing. The problem is that
Kandahar has been a war zone for quite some time, at least if we take a
fairly broad view of what constitutes war. From my perspective, war is
the prevailing condition whenever and wherever the possibility of
coercive intervention is strong; when adults kill and are killed in the
name of a nation, a religion, or a cause, and when children suffer the
consequences of such senseless human slaughter. 
I think it would be great to start a soccer club for children and youth
in Kandahar (security compliments of the Canadian Armed Forces). And I
think that child and youth workers are the right people for the job.
Here are five reasons why:
So far, I haven’t found too many takers for this idea. Most people just
say ‘no, thank you’, some write me off as nuts. And this bothers me a
lot. Not because with every passing day, childhood in Afghanistan passes
without the experience of being a child, and not because every so often,
we hear about another ‘unfortunate’ incident where the ‘liberating’
troops kill children by mistake; it bothers me because I am having such
a hard time finding a child and youth worker willing to contemplate
something different, something dangerous, something that is difficult,
perhaps impossible, to control. Putting one’s life at risk is not part
of the job of a child and youth worker, that’s true. But rejecting out
of hand the idea of being with kids in a war zone because it is a war
zone says something about who we have become.
Sure we work with kids in their life spaces, but only the nice ones
please.
Check out the following web sites:
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/culture/articles/eav032404.shtml