The Feminine Touch

Reds  4   Yellows  2

In Argentina they call them Villas Miseria – Misery Towns – rambling, ramshackle communities built on somebody else’s land with stolen bricks and cement, corrugated iron roofs and poor drainage.  Spider webs of electricity and telephone cables criss-cross the sky.

The oldest, biggest and most firmly established shanty-town in Buenos Aires is Villa 31, kind of squeezed behind the main long-distance bus terminal and alongside the tracks leading out of the Retiro railway station.

Me, I know no fear and with little regard for my own safety, I strode boldly into the narrow alleyways of Villa 31 to bring you a first-hand account of life where lesser men fear to tread.

A West Ham United baseball cap is usually all it takes to keep potential attackers at bay. Those crossed hammers translating in any language into ‘Don’t Mess With Me, Sucker!”

The fact that I was met on the outskirts of the shanty-town by a petite young woman called Carolina who works in the labyrinthine streets of Villa 31 armed with no more than a friendly smile and a willingness to make a difference should not detract from my undoubted bravery.

I was also accompanied by my kids, Benja, aged 12, and Lucas, 9, who has just passed his first Tae-Kwon do exam with flying colours, and Aunty Marilyn visiting from London.

Carolina works for an NGO called Goals for Girls/Metas para las Chicas that helps the girls and young women of the community to play football.

“Football,” I hear you gasp. “In Argentina! Now there’s a novelty.” But the truth is that it’s a man’s game here. Women in Argentina grow up with football, their dads and brothers play it, watch it, obsess about it, their boyfriends and husbands may even drag them to games and will still expect their dinner on the table afterwards, but women in general are not encouraged to play it. Those that defy convention and insist are given very little space in which to kick a ball.

The Goal...

Playing football in the Villa gives the girls that space. They practise regularly and play matches at the weekend. They are also given talks on the benefits of exercise and healthy eating in order to be better footballers but also to be healthier people in an environment where simply staying alive and finding the next meal is often the primary concern.

But it ain’t easy. A dusty dirt pitch has been marked out, surrounded on three sides by precarious looking houses and on the fourth by a brightly painted church. They’ve got two proper goals with nets and a bag of balls which are kept locked in a wooden cupboard.

The referee for this game between the reds and the yellows called in sick and a brief search ensued for a suitable mug, someone easy to abuse and too old and slow to keep up with the action, to fill the void. That honour fell to me. I vowed to be firm but fair but was mostly simply ignored.

The skill levels were high and the players were fierce but fair. Men pushing bikes, teenage boys smoking joints and on the prowl and women returning from shopping nonchalantly strolled across the field. Gangs of boys regularly started their own matches by the corner flags, gradually spreading out onto the pitch.

The female players are forced to look after kid brothers and sisters and kickoffs are delayed because the players have to complete household chores, ‘women’s work,’ before they’re allowed out.  Football, they’re told, is for boys.

But the girls are not listening. With the help of Goals for Girls they’re expanding and developing. About thirty of them play regularly, organising games against female teams from other shanty-towns. They’ve established links with women’s football federations from other countries and there’s the constant battle to raise funds for transport, kit and footballs.

It’s impossible to say with any certainty how many people live in Villa 31 because the residents don’t take kindly to questioners with clipboards delving into their lives and it’s a community that grows pretty much daily — with migrants arriving from Argentina’s poor northern provinces, squeezed off the land by drought and the ever more voracious soya producers. They’re joined by Paraguayans, Bolivians and Peruvians attracted to one of the wealthiest cities in Latin America.

It’s not a place you’d want to find yourself wandering in after dark. Most Porteños, as the residents of Buenos Aires call themselves, have seen Villa 31 from the train or from one of the long-distance buses taking them on their holidays to the coast or the mountains but few have ever set foot there, or would want to.

A dark mystique has grown up about the villas of Buenos Aires, fed by tales of the criminal gangs operating there, the crack cocaine factories, the teenage pregnancies, the murders.

The Church View

Manchester City’s Carlos Tevez grew up in Fort Apache, one of the city’s most notorious villas, and has told of how he’d lie awake at night listening to gunfire. All the stories that seep out into the affluent northern neighbourhoods are no doubt true. But there is another rarely told side to life in Argentina’s shanty towns.

The vast majority of residents are honest people fighting against the odds to give their children the opportunities they never had. They put great store by personal hygiene and are generally polite and generous to visitors.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not getting all romantic about shanty-town life. I’ve visited a few and am not about to fork out the US$10,000 that houses in Villa 31 reportedly sell for. The residents are neglected, exploited and ignored. But they’re not hopeless.

I blew the final whistle and walked off the pitch for a well-earned ice-cold bottle of water. The players didn’t seem to notice my departure and, despite the intense heat and humidity, kept playing – until they were called home to prepare lunch or look after a young sibling. The last stragglers were finally forced from the pitch by a torrential downpour.

Pictures by Benja

Goals for Girls website: http://www.democraciarepresentiva.org

For More: http://www.santelmoproductions.com/en/#/portfolio/goals_for_girls