Outside of the beaming nightlife and passionate community the World Cup has sparked in Boston, hundreds of kids are getting a piece of this summer’s sports-frenzy. This week’s Joy Beat celebrates the mix of an unforgettable soccer tournament into a culturally uplifting opportunity for some of the Bay state’s youngest fans.
A donation of more than 1,100 free FIFA World Cup tickets from Airbnb has given Massachusetts children the chance to attend portions of the world’s most popular sporting event hosted in their state. The Boston-based nonprofit Immigrant Family Services Institute (IFSI), along with several other organizations, helped distribute tickets to kids.
Sylviane Jeane Baptiste, the Child Enrichment and Youth Empowerment Manager at IFSI, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share more about this dreamlike opportunity for our youth. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: First, let me say, this is such an awesome experience for kids. Can you tell us how this initiative came to be?
Sylviane Jean Baptiste: Well, I can say on my end, that Dr. Geralde Gabeau, who is our CEO, did reach out to me early Tuesday, a couple weeks before the World Cup, to tell me that we got tickets. So we’ve been trying so hard to provide our youth that opportunity. However, we never got any word back until that week. And it was such awesome news to us. Quickly we got in planification, trying to reach out to all the youth and getting parents’ approval because we did have youth that were 14, underage, and allow them to actually spend that great, awesome time, together at the World Cup.
Rath: How do the young people get selected? How do they get that golden ticket?
Jean Baptiste: We serve a large amount of youth, We have over 100 youth in our programs. So to be fair, we only had 50 tickets, and within that amount, we also have to count the chaperones and some of the parents that also did volunteer to chaperone. So we came up with that raffle, and we thought that was the only fair way to allow them to actually get into the raffle and join the World Cup.
Rath: Brilliant. The games that they have tickets for, have these games already happened or are they coming up?
Jean Baptiste: Oh, they already happened. So it was last Saturday. So we [Haiti] have another game coming up, but we don’t have tickets for it.
Rath: This was the Haiti-Scotland game?
Jean Baptiste: Yes, correct.
Rath: Tell us about that. How did it go?
Jean Baptiste: Oh, phenomenal! Like really, really great. First we were all excited, you know, from the IFSI, location. We met at the IFSI office and then we had a bus taking us there. Throughout the entire bus, we were chanting, we were dancing, we were having [an] awesome time. And by the time that we got closer to the stadium, we saw our opponent and that’s when all the youth were at the windows cheering, but at the same time booing and then encouraging each other. So for me, it was really great to see that despite we were opponents, we still kind of [encouraged] each other throughout the entire match, before the match and after that we were handshaking. So it was really an awesome experience for the youth.
Rath: I’m imagining there’s a fair number of youth and their family who are of Haitian background.
Jean Baptiste: Oh, yes. All of them. All of them actually were Haitian background, except my coordinator. He’s African-American. But you will not even know he’s African American unless he tells you. So he’s learning Creole, Haitian Creole, and he’s being immersed into the culture, Haitian culture, so much that I could say all of us were Haitian at that time.
Rath: So just underscoring that fact, seeing Haiti play in the World Cup here in Boston, that must have just been amazing.
Jean Baptiste: Yes, it was an amazing experience that none of our youth will ever forget that experience. They took pictures, they took videos. It was really a great moment for them.
Rath: What kind of things did you hear from the young people and their families?
Jean Baptiste: Well, first they were disappointed that they didn’t win.
Rath: Of course.
Jean Baptiste: At the end throughout the entire bus [ride] they were trying to pinpoint, you know, this is what they did wrong. They should have got this hit. They should have done that. And then at the end of the day, I had to tell them, guys, listen, this is an amazing experience. After a lot of amount of years of us not being able to get into the World Cup, Haiti finally got into the World Cup. That’s really a great experience and we need to keep a growth mindset that we know that we’re going to keep moving. We have other games. We can actually do better. So at the end of the day, they were all happy. Despite the loss they were all happy for that amazing experience.
Rath: And tell us a bit more about these children, because these are children who are facing financial hardships. Just to give us a sense of their lives and what it means for them to have a day like that.
Jean Baptiste: Oh yeah. Most of us youth, they come from Haiti or other places where they were kicked out of their home, out of their place, city, and then they had to move to the United States. Some of them, they took the tragic tour from South America all the way up to the United States by feet sometimes, and it has not been easy for them. Throughout this entire year, we’ve put different workshops, different programs to help them with their mental health, to really, kind of give them a self-esteem, self-focus, to identify themselves as well within that new culture. And I think the World Cup, for them being part of that World Cup, actually did that so that they can see they can reach far. It doesn’t matter where they come from, it doesn’t matter their story, as long as they put the effort to it, they put the will into it, they will actually get there. So for them to actually be there, for me to experience that as their manager, as a leader, it’s really awesome.
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