Harnessing Haiti's Football Fever

Interesting story here in Christianity Today about how soccer is being used in post-earthquake Haiti.

As the world's most elite athletes vie for the World Cup title in South Africa, one professional soccer player brought fresh signs of hope to his fellow Haitians' still desperate situation for one weekend.

Piles of rubble fill the streets of Port-Au-Prince, and hundreds of thousands of families still live in tents as hurricane season rapidly approaches. In one tent city of about 15,000 people, aid workers are fighting an outbreak of typhoid. But for a few hours in late June, Haitian children learned soccer skills from one of their own.

Born and raised in Haiti, Ricardo Pierre-Louis made the Haitian national team at 17; but getting there wasn't easy. His parents couldn't afford to give him the 25 cents needed to buy a soccer ball, so he would make balls out of blown-up condoms. Out of millions of Haitian children, he was one of 25 selected to play on the national youth team at 14. Now he wants to do something similar for the Port-au-Prince children living in tents.

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