To save one’s life running after a ball.
It is one of the rare stories with a happy ending hidden in the rubbish and the desperation of the periphery of the African capital. The protagonists are a group of boys that until some years ago begged some spare food and a bit of glue to sniff in the chaotic and rotting streets of Nairobi. Today they play in an collector’s football team that classified in the local B league between the surprise and the admiration of a whole country. They are the Yassets, in other words the evidence that in football one can win even when he has always lost in life.

The streets of Nairobi, like the ones of many metropolis of Sub-Saharan Africa, are a big orphanage under the open sky. Thousands of children, kids, babies from all over Kenya and left to themselves, ask you for change or steal to survive. Violence, misery and desperation make them fragile and target in a world where for them there is never space. One can see them everywhere, in the centre as in the peripheral areas, avidly stuck to their glue tubes, the drug for desperate, buyable for a few shillings from the shoe polishers on the pavements. Sniffing it one can go far, even just for a few minutes, from the solitude and the sufferings common to the vagrancy and can find relief to the night cold, to the noise of the empty stomach. At the price, yet, of permanent mental damages.

“One day ten years ago, some street children were playing football in a space among the plate barracks of Satellite, one of the many shantytown at the periphery of Nairobi”, Charles Otieno, the ‘philosopher manager’ of the Yassets (he has a degree from the Yomo Kenyatta University) smiling remembers. “A car parked right close to the mountain of rags that worked as a door: a white missionary got out from the driving seat. The children complained: “Hey mzungu (European), move the car form there, let us play”. The missionary, Father Kizito Sesana, had an idea: to move them form the street letting them keep playing and training. This is how – Charles bursts in to laughter – this team was born”.

In a while, other children colleted form the pavements would enlarge the size of the team, that, being composed of young players grown in the shantytown of Satellite, was called itself Yassets: Young satellites.
“We played the first two young championships with no shoes, we could not afford them for obvious reasons”, Charles Otieno goes on. “They had only given us a few balls. Then from Italy someone sent some blue t-shirts, that became our uniform and our social colors”.

But Yassets was not an ordinary team. They started winning, escalating, year after year, the minor divisions of Kenyan football. Some local reporters heard talking about it and they join the public of the shantytown to see the matches, to then run to the respective editorial offices to move their fingertips on the typewriters, telling the emptive victory of the eleven street children.
The story went around Kenya and, a few weeks ago, the team obtained another incredible goal, the qualification for the second national championship.

“As a child, I used to play football all day long in the shantytown”, says Benson Njao, Yassets’ defence, called Stammy “because my favourite player is Yaap Stam”.
Njao was the first of the team to be called for an audition in the national team of Kenya. “As soon there was the rumour of a match somewhere I used to go there, at the price of walking for hours. But it was not a thoughtless life. I started sniffing glue and meeting bad people, but football and this team saved me. I learnt to play with the heart, to believe in myself. Today I can say – he goes on proud – I got it. We would have never expected to go so far. The poverty and misery that made us suffer have become our strength.
We used to run after a ball made of rags among the barracks and now we have reached a dream”.

Arush’s story

The central defence of the Yassets tells his past in the streets of Nairobi

On the passport there is written Gad Arunga, but his battle name is ‘Arush’. This is how everybody knows him, in the team. Among the components of the Yassets, Arush is the darkest. His glance always looks sad, almost sank in a past difficult to forget. A past of violence and privations, browsing among the mountains of rubbish the street of Nairobi are full of.

“I was born around twenty three years ago in a small village of Western Kenya”, Arush starts to say. “I used to live with my parents and other seven brothers and sisters. My parents did not have a permanent job. We were very poor. Therefore, when I was four, my father moved to Nairobi looking for a job. It is there I have always lived. Like all the little children they put me in a state primary school. I was good, the teachers said I had excellent marks and that I had to keep studying, but there was no money. My father could not feed us; forget about sending us to school. So I had to quit studying very soon. Only who lives in the slums of Nairobi can understand what it means to be really poor. The football on the street was my only distraction. I did not have anything else. And soon I ended up really living on the street”.

The tone of Arush’s voice changes, his eyes get wet. “I have been wondering in the streets on Nairobi for three long years – I goes on -. When you are alone and you do not have anything you become a target for everybody. You always have to be careful, to look at our back. Your life is on risk every minute. It is an endless suffering. That is why the glue tube became the only way to escape this reality, to alienate myself. A sniff, and I could forget my disgraces. I did not feel anything else. Not even the cutting cold of the nights of Nairobi, one of the most hostile enemies for the street children. Today I am a twenty three years old young, but I do not want a family. I do not want my children to live what I have lived.”

Arush cannot carry on. The tears run on his cheeks. The voice is broken in a quiet crying. He hides his head in the hands for a while then he looks at the sky, the eyes still filled with memories. Then he displays his toothless smile. And he goes on. “One day I was playing with some children and a man parked the car close to our goal. We asked him to move it. He did much more, hosting us in his centre and building up the team.