By PK Lee From where Esther Goba sat watching two football teams clad in “HIV-POSITIVE” T-shirts competing in a football tournament in Limbe, Malawi, she wouldn’t strike you as someone who is at the frontlines of the life-or-death match against HIV/Aids. But Esther, aged 53, is doubly affected: she has been living with HIV for…
By Maureen Mazibisa and Borrie La Grange How strange it would be if the players in a World Cup winning side were to meet just five days before the deciding match for the very first time to train together and then take the title with a convincing victory … But when Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)…
By Joanne Sage The 2010 Fifa World Cup is in its final stage and the excitement in Southern Africa is still palpable even in Zimbabwe where I work as a nurse for Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on an HIV/Aids treatment project. An excitement that can’t be dampened despite the disappointment of…
By Baikong Mamid It’s difficult going anywhere without getting caught up in the football fever these days. The World Cup is in the semi-final stage this week and I have to admit that the football bug has bitten me in a big way — even though I was never a football fan before. Now I…
By Lungile Dlamini The Thwala family gathers around the small radio set to listen to the commentary of the 2010 Fifa World Cup tournament kick-off. The excitement in the little four-roomed house is so huge, neighbours walking past can almost feel it. Like millions of soccer lovers around the world, the Thwalas have been…
There are six African teams in the World Cup in 2010 — and another six in the HalfTime five-a-side tournament planned for Friday July 2 in Johannesburg. Swaziland is one of the determined soccer teams of HalfTime. This small nation, South Africa’s nearest neighbour in the Southern African region, and facing an even higher Aida…
By Marcell Nimfuehr In January this year I travelled to Cameroon to make a health promotion film that featured Sylvestre, a patient who motivates others to seek treatment. Sylvestre is a softly spoken man in his 30s and at the hospital in Akonolinga town in east Cameroon he is the master of the television set…
The World Cup spirit is felt everywhere here in Khayelitsha! Since I arrived a year ago from Brazil to work for MSF in this impoverished township near Cape Town, I have never seen the patients so proud as today! They come to the clinic wearing their yellow and green Bafana Bafana jerseys, so excited about…
*Read MSF’s latest report: No time to quit: HIV/Aids treatment gap widening in Africa.
Truly speaking, the little I know about morality, I learnt it on football pitches. Albert Camus, French philosopher and Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature. In four days’ time the sound of a whistle and crisp thud of a boot on a football will herald a month when the world’s eyes are fixed on South Africa….
