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Posts Tagged ‘back on my feet’

Chilean Homeless Playing Soccer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on June 12, 2014| Leave a Comment »

My, but we work hard at the office. At 4 today, everything stopped and we went to the break room to watch the World Cup. A co-worker from Ghana called his brother. Everything had stopped in Ghana, too.

In honor of the world’s fascination with soccer today, I am posting a futbol story from Bill Littlefield’s radio show Only a Game.

At the show’s website, Ellis O’Neill describes an encounter he had with homeless soccer: “It’s 9 p.m. and the sun went down long ago, but that’s not stopping this group of about 20 young men from playing soccer under the bright lights of a turf field in Puente Alto, a poor suburb to the south of Santiago, Chile.

“Homeless Soccer aims to offer the benefits of sports to Chile’s homeless. It’s been so successful that, over the past eight years, it’s grown from one team that practiced in one Santiago park to almost 100 teams all over the country.

“Domingo Correa is a longtime participant in Homeless Soccer. He first joined back in 2011, and his nickname is Jack Sparrow. With his long dreadlocks and beard, his piercings and rings and his high, sharp cheekbones, he lives up to the name. But Correa doesn’t have a pirate ship, much less any treasure. For 15 years, he lived on the streets of Santiago.

“ ‘There’s no way out, you know?’ Correa said. ‘You think everything has been lost. You have no hope of finding stable work. Also, I had been involved in crime, so I had “stained papers,” as we say here: I had a criminal history. The distance between society and living on the street is enormous.’

“One day, while Correa was watching a Homeless Soccer practice in a Santiago park, the team’s psychologist invited him to join in. He decided to take a stab at it, and he liked what he found. For the first time, there was a group of people that was always there for him – every Monday and Wednesday evening on the soccer field.”

Read how soccer changed Correa’s life, here.

Reminds me of what running means to the Back on My Feet homeless folks that my friend Meg told me about, here.

Highlights from the 2011 Homeless World Cup

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Runners’ Miracles

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »

My friend Meg is a runner. She runs for the joy of running, and she runs to support worthy causes like research on liver disease. Several times a week, she rises early and runs with friends and a few homeless folks who have found running to be a step toward getting their lives in order.

Meg blogs about running, too. Here she talks about running “with a team of homeless men and women from Downtown Crossing’s Boston Rescue Mission.”

Here she tells how she learned about Back on My Feet after seeing the program’s T-shirts being worn in a race:

“Running, as a means of teaching work and life skills to residents of homeless shelters.  Using their attendance, attitude, dedication to morning runs to gain access to job training, housing assistance, and help paying for and attaining education.  Intriguing, indeed.  Especially since I’d not noticed a single homeless person in that crowd of runners.

“A lifelong runner myself, I could evidence upticks in productivity and personal satisfaction when I was most engaged in running.  Was it possible that what worked for me could work for the city’s most troubled?

“I filled out the online interest form.  A few weeks later, I got an email confirming an evening orientation session, where nearly a dozen gathered to learn about the program. Vic Acosta, Boston Chapter Program Director, filled me with hope, enthusiasm, and energy – from that moment, I knew that Back On My Feet would be my kind of group.

“A few days later, I set that early morning alarm for the first time.

“I met the team – residents and non-residents both – that morning.  We ran a few miles, and I went home to prepare for work, still not knowing which runners were the residents [of the homeless shelter].  Then, I began to really understand the power of Back On My Feet: on those early mornings, we weren’t residents or non-residents, we were teammates.”

Now can I tell you the rest of story as it was told to me?

One day Meg mentioned to one of the homeless guys that she planned to drive up to Lowell with friends for a race. He was interested. He asked if he could come along. He said he was from Lowell and had been estranged from his family for years because of troubles with the law and with substance abuse. He wondered tentatively, hopefully, whether anyone in his family might like to see him now that he had gotten clean.

Meg took him along, and he ran with her group. At the end of the race his family was there. Cheering.

Photo: http://www.backonmyfeet.org/

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