Dubai jiu-jitsu coach gives hope to orphans in Zimbabwe
Cezar Takeyoshi Ikehara is a long way from his Brazilian jiu-jitsu school in Dubai.
At an orphanage on the outskirts of Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, he is entirely at home.
Mr Ikehara’s academy in Dubai’s Motor City is an oasis of calm. The floor is lined with white mats, the walls have Japanese paintings and there are potted plants throughout.
In Harare he is using old judo mats laid out on a football pitch, surrounded by uncut grass and bordered by rusty, net-less goalposts. In Dubai he trains bankers, investors, computer programmers and traders. In Harare he is training orphans, many of them left parentless by the HIV epidemic that has swept the country.
“Jiu-jitsu is amazing,” says Mr Ikehara, a Brazilian who has called the Emirates home for the past eight years.
“Look how happy the kids are and look at how it connects us.”
Mr Ikehara, 50, a black belt and former world champion, has come to Zimbabwe with the sole purpose of using jiu-jitsu to empower orphans. “This has brought me back twenty years,” he says.
Before moving to the Emirates, he used to run a charity project in his native Brazil, teaching jiu-jitsu in the favelas.
“Today, kids from that project are teaching and competing all over the world,” he says. “When I teach the kids, I tell them a black belt is a passport to the world – they can go anywhere.”
Mr Ikehara moved to the UAE to train the nation’s military, but his gift is connecting with children. “I give my heart to teach you,” he says at one of the sessions with boys and girls aged 4 to 19. “We [jiu-jitsu] are a family. We teach discipline, respect and community. We all help each other.”
More than a quarter of children under 18 in Zimbabwe are not living with either parent, and most of these have been abandoned or orphaned, figures compiled by Unicef show.
Many of those orphaned have lost parents to Aids. Zimbabwe has an HIV infection rate of about 12 per cent, one of the highest in the world.
To start his sessions Mr Ikehara picks the smallest child and asks them to perform the “balloon sweep”, in which they throw the 85-kilogram Brazilian over their shoulders and into a roll. He calls it the “superhero” and it builds trust.
“With jiu-jitsu anything is possible,” he says. “Whenever I am stressed, I do jiu-jitsu. It is my Prozac.” He says the martial art helped him to cope after his son died at the age of 13.
Mr Ikehara is in Zimbabwe for only a week. But he spends time training local teachers to carry on his work. He says: “The next world champion could come from Zimbabwe.”