Never too young to help others reach their goals
Sphiwayinkosi Gazu is just 24, but he runs his own soccer and maths coaching programme
THE three ramshackle prefab buildings — spill-over classrooms from a nearby school — are a pretty fair reflection of Mount Moriah, in the north of Durban.
The buildings are run-down, and so is the suburb. In much the same way as water leaks through the roofs during heavy and even not-so-heavy rain, so water leaks from broken pipes in the suburb’s streets.
As much as the buildings could do with some TLC, so could Mount Moriah itself. The buildings have no electricity, and neither did large parts of the suburb — due to overnight cable theft — when the Sunday Times visited last week.
But inside those buildings something remarkable is happening. On a wet, chilly Saturday morning, young Zulu voices echo from inside, answered by an older man. The tone is a combination of earnest concentration and laughter.
Standing at the front of the class is Sphiwayinkosi Gazu, who is 24 years old.
He writes a series of numbers and equations on the board, pausing often to give the class of about 20 kids the chance to fill in the blanks and answer the sums. He praises them for every right answer but is soft and gentle when explaining to those who get it wrong.
Gazu is not a maths teacher. In fact — as much as he might look the part in just about every way — he isn’t a teacher at all. Gazu is a soccer coach.
“It was early in 2014 when I was crossing the river and saw children playing soccer,” Gazu said. “They didn’t have a coach, so I joined in and started helping them.”
The boys he coached had tattered and worn-out shoes. The ball they used had taken a battering from the dirt pitch.
But there was an excitement that Gazu instantly found appealing. So he got involved. TEAM SPIRIT: Sphiwayinkosi Gazu (wearing hat) coaches kids in the finer points of soccer, above, and left, he explains the intricacies of maths during a Saturday morning class in Mount Moriah
“We started training twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” he said.
“The boys are mainly between Grade 4 and Grade 6, but sometimes we have older boys, too. I’ve started arranging matches for them against other teams in other areas now.”
While we speak, his team are doing warm-up and fitness exercises on the dusty field. They’re sprinting in pairs to get loose and get the air heaving through their lungs and the blood pumping through their veins. Gazu makes them move on to a passing and close-control drill, before they play a tactical game of five-a-side.
This is not a bunch of youngsters kicking a ball randomly; they and Gazu clearly take this seriously. As Gazu got to know these kids and learn about their backgrounds, he realised that soccer skills were not what they needed most.
“I found out that they were not doing too well at school, especially maths. I was quite good at maths, so I thought that I should try and help them. It had been a long time since I was in matric, so I had to teach myself again first. But after that, I started teaching them,” he said.
And that is how the Saturday classes in those three buildings started. From 8.30am for an hour, if you want to play for Gazu’s teams that weekend, you must be at your desk with your books open.
What makes Gazu’s contribution even more remarkable is that he isn’t paid a cent — not for the coaching, and not for the teaching.
“If I sit and think about it, I get really worried,” he said. “I look around and see the wrong things that these kids could be doing. They could go into drugs, or start drinking, or do crime. They can get involved in all kinds of wrong things. I don’t want these kids to lose direction.”
Gazu and his squad call themselves Team Never Die.
“My younger brother came up with the name. We were trying to come up with something that was not going to end. It talks about having a dream. We don’t want to just build a team, it’s more about the future,” he said.
Gazu’s efforts were noticed about a month earlier by DA city councillor Pete Graham, who was exploring the area shortly after winning the ward in the August 3 election. He wanted to get to know, from the people who lived there, what the challenges and opportunities were in Mount Moriah.
As he walked he heard the voices coming from the classrooms and went to investigate.
“In my eyes, he is a real hero,” said Graham.
Since then, Graham has held a meeting with local residents and stakeholders, including the principal of the nearby school, to see what can be done.
There are plans to get others to help Gazu teach, and to make repairs to the prefab buildings.
Gazu said that any help he got with obtaining soccer kit would be great, but that it was in the classroom where he needed the most assistance.
“It would be better if someone could help me, and not just for this year but also next year. And if someone could come, maybe a celebrity, to motivate them to focus on their school work, that would be very, very good.”
I look around and see the wrong things these kids could be doing. Drugs, crime