Basketball, Life Require Teamwork
Hutus vs. Tutsis. Bloods vs. Crips.
Africans. African-Americans.
Tribal warfare throughout Rwanda’s countryside. Gang warfare on inner-city streets in the United States.
Rwanda isn’t as far from America as the 9,000 miles that separate the two countries.
There are numerous similarities between members of these groups.
And maybe not so ironically, in the midst of it all, there are those attempting to get all the warring factions to make peace through basketball.
To heck with playing in the NBA. Now the game is being used to save lives.
Last year, Spokane’s Brad Rothrock of the Catholic Relief Services in Rwanda, with the help of Hoopfest organizers, delivered 2,000 basketballs, 300 soccer balls and countless Hoopfest and Bloomsday T-shirts to a nation that was decimated after 500,000 Hutus and Tutsis were exterminated by each other’s opposition forces.
“After genocide, you can’t expect sports to bring about reconciliation, but it was a small gesture for a start,” Rothrock said Thursday.
Rothrock, 37, is in town with his parents, Rocky and Lolly Rothrock, until July 20. He is recovering from surgery to a deviated septum.
“The response by the Rwandans (to basketball) has been overwhelming,” he said. “There’s a lot of hopelessness there.”
On May 11 and 12 at Kigali, Rwanda, “Hoopfest Umuhuza” took place. Umuhuza is a Kinyarwanda word for “coming together.”
Posters covered the city and radio announcements were broadcast to publicize the event, which was held at Amahoro (Peace) Stadium.
According to Rothrock, eight men’s teams and two women’s teams participated in the two-day tournament. In the men’s final, the underdog team, “Espoir” (French for Hope), took the lead in the last 3 minutes of the game and went on to win 69-65.
In the format, there is no Hutu against Tutsi. Teams are mixed. A Hutu brings the ball up the floor, whereupon his Tutsi teammate may post up another Tutsi and attempt to score.
Working together.
“The thing that is really ironic is that they have the same language, the same religion, and over the years, Hutus and Tutsis have intermarried and lived with each other side by side,” Rothrock said.
In the U.S. today, too many African-Americans - speaking the same language, following the same religion, marrying each other and living side by side - are killing each other like never before.
Where predominantly African-American churches, public school systems and families have fallen apart and failed, basketball has served as a tool to get guns out of the hands of African-Americans, especially the young ones.
In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, former President Bush was so impressed with the concept of “Midnight Basketball,” he named it one of his “Thousand Points of Light.”
“The last thing midnight basketball is about is about basketball,” Bush said in 1991 at Glenarden, Md., site of the first such basketball program in the country.
“It’s about providing opportunity for young adults to escape drugs and the street and get on with their lives,” Bush said. “It’s not coincidental that the crime rate is down 60 percent (in the Glenarden area) since this program began.”
Even though a proposed crime-bill package that included federal funding for midnight basketball to various cities around the country was rejected in February 1995, many local municipalities kept such programs going that weren’t receiving a dime of federal dollars.
As for Rwanda …
“It’s tough,” Rothrock says. “The country is calm, but there are still 1.7 million refugees in Zaire and Tanzania who want to go home.
“There are a lot of questions and not many answers. It’s hard to predict right now what will happen in Rwanda.”
The same holds true for many people in many places in America.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kevin Blocker The Spokesman-Review