July 19 & 20:
Background: The Ball has partnered with more than 80 organizations en route to New Zealand. Spirit of Football is a German-based education NGO. There have been plenty of connections to German football clubs (Borussia Dortmund, Werder Bremen and Bayer Leverkusen) and to German Embassies and diplomatic missions (Singapore, Indonesia, Fiji, Kiribati and New Zealand) en route. In Singapore The Ball collaborated with the Goethe Institut – German cultural institute. The Goethe Institut in New Zealand in turn connected The Ball to schools in New Zealand.
German teacher Mirjam Wradatsch jumped at the opportunity to host The Ball and signed-up 22 German students from years 9 to 11 and from diverse ethnic backgrounds at LYnfield College in multicultural Mt. Roskill, Auckland for The Ball’s 2-day workshop. A highlight for students and for the school was that TVNZ sent a film crew to report on the story.
The workshop took place in Denglisch: a fun mixture of German and English. 17 year old Paul, Andrew’s son from Germany, helped to facilitate the workshop and was able to connect to the participants who were of a similar age by playing German music and even playing Uno in German with them.
Mirjam, who is also a Special Needs teacher, included special needs kids in the FairPlay Football session that the SOF team ran. A few aha moments followed: having conducted a clean-up of the school, collected rubbish was dumped onto one of the football pitches at one point and the children had to play with rubbish on the field. On the other field, all players were asked to freeze and all boys were sent off of the field. Reflecting upon these so-called “handicaps” with the participants, the children talked about their feelings and realized why the SOF team had done this: Boys felt the exclusion that girls the world over continue to face and the bridge had been built for the participants to realize that we all are living on a planet full of plastic waste. We need to take care to ensure that everyone can play and fairplay not only with people is important but also with the only planet we have. There is no planet B
