{"id":133,"date":"2008-08-30T21:02:38","date_gmt":"2008-08-30T21:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thebutterflytree.org.uk\/pages\/2008\/mukuni-olympians\/"},"modified":"2009-04-03T09:35:34","modified_gmt":"2009-04-03T09:35:34","slug":"mukuni-olympians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebutterflytree.org.uk\/pages\/2008\/mukuni-olympians\/","title":{"rendered":"Mukuni Olympians"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the successful Beijing Olympics, costing over \u00a320 billion to stage, finally over,\u00a0it is truly amazing to see the likes of Kenya and Jamaica\u00a0in thirteenth and fifteenth place respectively on the medal table. Both extremely poor countries and yet they have produced\u00a0many of the finest and fastest record-breaking runners on earth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During my last trip to Zambia I was lucky enough to experience the annual Sports\u00a0Events for the Mukuni Chiefdom. Knowing how much is spent on sport in the west it is hard to believe that only four\u00a0out of the twelve schools in the chiefdom\u00a0turned up. The reason\u00a0being that most of the schools could not afford the \u00a325 affiliation fee and out of the four that attended The Butterfly Tree paid for Mukuni<\/a> and\u00a0Ngandu School<\/a> who had failed to raise the funds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Mukuni
\nPhoto: Mukuni Olympians <\/em><\/p>\n

Sport is such an important part of a school’s curriculum and when I saw the effort these children had made to hold this event it\u00a0was a\u00a0very humbling experience. Despite the charity funding two mini\u00a0buses and paying for food supplies many pupils still had to walk ten miles to the grounds, camping out on the floor of a classroom.\u00a0Zanox<\/a> kindly donated over 30 footballs which\u00a0I distributed amongst the local teams. When I visit these remote villages of the Mukuni chiefdom and see the school teams using ‘bag and string’ footballs\u00a0I\u00a0am horrified to think of how much is spent on football in the UK.\u00a0No\u00a0expensive Nike or Addidas football boots; just bare feet, a patch of dirt and a couple of stakes at each end of the pitch.<\/p>\n

With your funds we can provide improved sporting facilities,\u00a0hard-wearing footballs and netballs complete with\u00a0HIV\/AIDS and malaria awareness logos\u00a0for as little as \u00a38.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the successful Beijing Olympics, costing over \u00a320 billion to stage, finally over,\u00a0it is truly amazing to see the likes of Kenya and Jamaica\u00a0in thirteenth and fifteenth place respectively on the medal table. Both extremely poor countries and yet they More details ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebutterflytree.org.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebutterflytree.org.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebutterflytree.org.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebutterflytree.org.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebutterflytree.org.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebutterflytree.org.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebutterflytree.org.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebutterflytree.org.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebutterflytree.org.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}