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Snapshots are on the ground reports from our editorial department, field notes offering context, perspective, and a sharp lens on the cultures shaping the game.
Editorials
Members
Think Tank
Image Licensing
About
Snapshots are on the ground reports from our editorial department, field notes offering context, perspective, and a sharp lens on the cultures shaping the game.
Gabriele Campanella
Wandering around the village among the cows, corn fields and green hills, I observed something interesting: in a village of not even 800 people, there were 4 football fields—not 5vs5 or 7vs7 ones, they were proper 11vs11 fields—in the most unimaginable conditions. The biggest one, next to the polytechnic school, shocked me more than the other, for there were holes, or better, craters almost a meter deep in the penalty area; the left part of the field was at least 4 meters higher than the right side of it, causing a constant slope throughout the field; half of it was completely dry, made out of red ground, and the other half was knee-high grass.
“How can people play football here,” I thought. It looked like a battlefield to me. I was clearly not ready.
People in Nyagwethe lived for football. Literally.
Time flows slower, and sometimes, it doesn’t flow at all. Though the days are all very similar, and people face poverty, they hold an immutable dignity. But unlike the adults, the kids dream of becoming footballers. As in many other parts of the world, this dream is not only caused by the fame that comes with it, but it is also a way to truly escape that space-time they can’t cross otherwise. The gravitational force of the African green countryside attracts them inevitably.
Football, especially the Premier, is watched everywhere in the village. It is followed on the old radios, and shown at the village pub—even the “pool room” was football themed with the sides of the table decorated with the faces of the greatests. This is the context in which kids grow.
On the first day of practice, I gained more clarity.
At 4:00 PM sharp, in the smallest field of all next to the future Nyagwethe Youth Center (now under construction), I was to teach 25 kids from the ages of 8 to 16. Nobody is on time in Africa. “Quite a good start”, I thought.
After my speech where I explained what we were going to do in the next few weeks together, I let them play. I wanted to see how they took on the field, who the leaders were, who the bullied ones were, and how the age difference could affect the game.
I am a firm believer of the claim that the essence of one’s personality shows when they’re playing football, it shows who they are. Watching the kids play would help me understand how to help them. But what I saw left me speechless.
The game was absolute chaos–and by chaos I don’t mean a representation of a usual game between kids where the lack of tactics and skills are motivated by age. The game was real, it was violent, fought by everybody. Even the youngest ones were incredibly fast and strong. In Nyagwethe, most of the children help their families fishing in the lake in the morning. They use nets long hundreds of meters that are pulled back by hand to the beach. It takes hours and an incredible force to do this job, and it is common to see these five-year-old kids pulling the nets. Their force was built.
With this formation, none of the players could be identified by their height, strength or age. They were all part of a cloud of bodies moving simultaneously, similar to the ones made by birds, or bees. They were hypnotised by that round object rolling and jumping all over the place. It was here where I noticed one more curious thing: none of them could shoot. Not even the best ones, or the oldest ones, or the ones with actual shoes on. The reason is pretty obvious—with the chaos of the game, the players don’t focus on achieving their final objective of scoring.
Most of them wore flip-flops, and before shooting, something incredibly peculiar happened on the field where every shooter, when bringing the leg back, was able to get rid of their sandal in order to have a better feeling on the ball. In the following seconds, the player would have to decide whether to grab and re-place the flip flop, losing precious seconds after the inaccurate shot, or to continue without it.
Nobody wanted to be the striker. For a football fan coming from the west, this is a paradox. They knew they were fighters, not finalizers. So I found my own.
At the end of the first game I decided to join the fight. I’m a pretty old-school Italian defender. Tough center back, very little passing skills. In that field though, I was Pirlo. Everyone was after me, and wanted to show me how much effort they were putting in the game.
But one player, a 14-year-old boy named Ken, really surprised me. I told him to cut through the defender behind him to receive my pass. I was playing in the back where I crossed the ball, and suddenly, he stopped it, shot and scored. We made it happen 3 times during the game. My number 10 was born.
For the following weeks, we trained the fundamentals: positions and roles drills, passing and shooting exercises, 3-touches-allowed games. The kids developed discipline on the field incredibly fast, and since they were so used to playing with one another, chemistry was instantly present, from passing combinations, to trusting each other in front of the goal.
The final test was a friendly game against an adult team made up of true grown men that was getting ready for a local tournament. We were slated to play in the field with the slope.
The entire team showed up. In the starting 11, we had 2 to 8 year olds. They all held their heads high, showing no fear. It was a chance to show their world what they were made of.
We definitely were not taken seriously by the other team.
Ken scored 2 goals in the first half and we were able to concede just one. But the second half was an assault. The opponents tried as hard as they could to score. They were stronger, faster, and more prepared. And despite a couple of subs, the kids got tired fast. But just like the rest of the teams in the area, they couldn’t score either. We won the game 2-1.
The match was followed by a great celebration. And after, we went back to the village world, pulled by that invincible gravitational force that only football was able to defy.
I always wanted to do a volunteering experience in Africa. Through Workaway, I found this amazing program in Nyagwethe. What I liked about it was how authentic it felt. The region is mostly rural, surrounded by rainforests and mountains. Tourist activities are basically not existent. I was hosted for the full duration of my stay at Julius's hut, the founder of the Nyagwethe Youth Center: a foundation that is building the first creative center for children in the region. The idea of the youth center is to educate children through creativity and artistic activities such as drawing, acting, sculpting: soft skills that are not included in the usual educational offer because they are "unnecessary". The goal of Kenyan schools, especially in rural regions, is to teach a job.
Nyagwethe means so much to me because for the first time I was able to bring together photos I took coupled with thoughts and things I'd written during the trip. I tried to give a grasp of what rural West Kenya is not only through space, but especially through time. The perception of time I've had during those days was substantially different from what I was used to. I felt part of a reality whose time doesn't move forward and somehow stayed still.
The Youth Center is 30% funded. Julius bought the land and he built the center. He is currently flooring and buying windows and doors and is planning on finishing construction by 2027. If you’d like to donate to the center, you can support here on GoFundMe, or buy a print from my zine here where proceeds will go to the GoFundMe.
About Gabriele
Gabriele, Gabri, Campanella is a director and photographer based in London, working primarily in the UK and Italy on commercial sets. Before Nyagwethe, he worked on two photo projects: a VR art exhibition about Nepal and India, and a reportage piece called "The Border Line,” which deals with the situation at the border between Poland and Ukraine two weeks after the war started.
You can find Gabri on Instagram here.