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Youth League Fights HIV/AIDS With Soccer
https://www.sportanddev.org/latest/news/youth-league-fights-hiv/aids-soccer
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Jeré Longman, a sports writer for the New York Times newspaper has been reporting from this summer’s World Cup in South Africa. He recently visited Mawewe, a rural village in the Mpumalanga Province near the eastern border with Swaziland and Mozambique to meet Sarah Kate Noftsinger, an ex-soccer palyer that has travelled to South Africa to establish a youth soccer league.

With 5.7 million people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, South Africa has more infected individuals than any other country in the world.

In this rural pocket of the Rainbow Nation 65 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 34 are infected and between 5,000 and 8,000 children under the age of 5 have been orphaned.

15 months ago Sarah Kate Noftsinger began TRIAD Nkomazi Rush, a youth soccer league that utilises the popularity of soccer in South Africa to begin to break the stigma around HIV and share essential sexual health education.

“It’s a way to address something that nobody wants to talk about through a game that everybody loves,” Noftsinger says.

The league has spread to five local villages with an estimated 2,500 boys on 160 teams. Crucially, Noftsinger envisions a sustainable future for the project with full-time jobs for local administrators, coaches and medical workers in an area with an unemployment rate estimated at 60 to 90 percent.

Read Jeré Longman’s article in full here and download the brochure for TRIAD Nkomazi Rush here.

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