Sport4Change

The powerful effect of AIDS in Africa inspired international soccer star Methembe Ndlovu not only to help found an organization dedicated to teaching African youth about the disease, but also led him back home, to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, to lead the effort himself. Ndlovu manages the Zimbabwe site of Grassroot Soccer, which uses soccer to deliver messages intended to save young people’s lives.

Ndlovu spent 1993-97 at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, where he majored in government and played Big Green soccer, achieving All-Ivy status. He continued his soccer career in the years after college, playing for the Albuquerque Geckos and the Highlanders Football Club in Zimbabwe. In 1999, he began coaching, eventually working his way to head coach of the Highlanders, a position he continues to hold.

But while he achieved celebrity and enjoyed the life of a superstar football player, even Ndlovu could not escape the ravages of AIDS. He has lost his uncle and several close friends, including a teammate with whom he lived. The teammate’s experience had a profound effect on Ndlovu. In Africa, AIDS carries such a powerful social stigma that even beloved soccer stars who fans suspect of infection become targets of ridicule and derision.

“Being a soccer player, you get spoiled a little bit,” said Ndlovu in a 2003 interview with the Weekly Alibi, Albuquerque’s independent newspaper. “Everybody always wants to talk to you and everybody wants to be around you. Then, once word starts getting around that you might be sick, suddenly everybody wants to be as far away from you as they can be. It’s very, very disturbing.”

HIV/AIDS has thrown African countries including Zimbabwe into a public health crisis. Zimbabwe’s life expectancy has dropped from 69 in 2000 to 35 in 2006, according to the World Health Organization. More than 60 percent of Zimbabwe’s 15-year-old boys are expected to become HIV-infected during their lives.

Grassroot Soccer provides African youth with the knowledge, skills and support to live HIV free through a curriculum that emphasizes confidence, individuality and choices and is based on the sport of soccer. It uses professional soccer players as educators and role models for the youth. Ndlovu helped found the organisation in 2002. He returned to Bulawayo, where he was born, in January 2006. He is also assistant coach of the Zimbabwe National Team.

Dr. Tommy Clark, Grassroot Soccer founder and executive director and Ndlovu’s former teammate at Dartmouth, has offered Ndlovu his praise.

“Perhaps the only things more impressive than his achievements are his quiet sense of humor and his humility,” Clark has said. “This is a huge boost for our program.”

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