In Soccer, A Glimmer of Hope Haiti's national U-17 women's soccer team makes emotional appearance at regional championship.
For the girls of Haiti's Under-17 national squad, it's more than just a game.
Every member of the 20-girl team was left homeless after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake ravaged their country on Jan. 12.
The girls are living in makeshift installations near their stadium in Port-au-Prince, where soccer has gone from a sport to a home and teammates have become family.
Less than two months after the earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people, the team, struggling with loss and depression, departed for the U-17 women's championship of the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football, or CONCACAF, in Alajuela, Costa Rica, giving their fellow Haitians back home a small sign of hope and recovery in the wake of death and destruction.
The team was at practice in the Port-au-Prince stadium when the quake struck, just before 5 p.m. They slept in the stadium and the next day went to look for their parents.
“They walked six or seven hours to their homes,” Georgelie Berry, the vice president of the Haitian Football Federation, said on the sidelines of the team's practice. Many of the players live in the provinces outside of the Haitian capital.
For the players, the trauma is still fresh.
“Before the earthquake, the team was strong. There have been a lot of problems,”said Berry. “None of them have houses. After the earthquake, they say they don't feel well. Their heads hurt. They're thinking about their families. But we're here to win.”
But almost every team member took to the field on March 10, the opening match of the championship leading up to the Women's U-17 World Cup in Trinidad and Tobago this September. Madeline Delice, 16, could not, however. She returned to her home outside the capital to find that her mother and father were both killed in the quake. Berry says she has been unable to play since then. Delice, a goalkeeper, her hair in short braids that reach midway down her cheeks, sat at the sidelines, holding a small Haitian flag as she watched her teammates open the championship in a tough match against the United States.
“During training, they would cry before, during and after. They would cry and cry and cry.” said Haiti's coach James Morisset. “We're obligated to come here, and we're going to do the best we can to make the Haitian people smile.”
The US, the eight-team championship's favorite, beat Haiti 9-0. When the match ended, Haiti's Alexandra Coby fell to the ground in tears. Several members of the US squad approached her and embraced the goalkeeper.
“After the game I saw that some of the girls were crying a little bit,” said US coach Kazbek Tambi. “On one hand they came here to play great soccer and to win, and on the other hand, the fact that we were playing Haiti and beat them by a relatively big score, there was little bit of sadness even within our group that that was our first opponent.”
After their defeat against the US, the crowd at the stadium, including the Cayman Islands' squad, which went on to beat Haiti, 1-0, sealing their elimination from the World Cup, chanted “Hai-ti! Hai-ti! Hai-ti!” Their loss in the CONCACAF championship failed to overshadow the signal their presence at the tornament showed to Haitians and their neighbors.
Article Produced for Latinamerica Press; También disponible en español en Noticias Aliadas