Eastside FC News: Eastside FC helping in Rwanda

Eastside FC coach Dan Redwine recently went to Rwanda to participate in the Play for Hope Rwanda program.

Play for Hope's mission is for long term, sustainable sports growth in Rwanda with two goals: to bring holistic ministry and rehabilitation to the 'street kids' of Rwanda, and to provide these children with professional level coaching.

Dan's trip was made possible by donations from his G92 White and G94 White teams and Julie Chandler from Michelle French's Girls 94 Red team. Julie will be going to Rwanda with her daughter Katie in June as part of Play for Hope.

Here are a few highlights from Dan's trip in his words:

Training the Rwandan coach’s who work with the street kids teams that Play for Hope has formed. We basically put the coach’s through a 6 day USSF D license course and added topics like Sports Psychology, Motivation, Drug Rehab, and Leadership Skills. We spent half the day in the classroom and half on the field.

Traveling to the villages to work with the street kid teams.

Distributing uniforms and soccer equipment to the street kids teams (it is a HUGE deal for the kids to play with “real” uniforms and a new soccer ball). A lot of the uniforms that Play for Hope has to distribute were donated by Sean Payton's Play it Forward Foundation, which I think some EFC girls are a big part of.

Visiting the Genocide Memorial Center in Kigali (the capital city of Rwanda).

Hosting and coordinating a 2 day tournament for all the street kid teams in Play for Hope (this is really hard to pull off in Rwanda because you have to pay for and organize every detail for the teams: transport to and from the fields, food, and we also refereed all the games).

We were invited to train the top academy team in Rwanda (Club SEC) one afternoon…it awesome. One of their players was just signed by Barcelona and is leaving for their youth academy in Qatar on January 28th. (He is the one I am pictured with in yellow jersey)