New Uniforms for Ndugu Mdogo Rugby Team

A team of budding rugby players from Koinonia’s Ndugu Mdogo Rescue Centre has recently received a donation of brand new uniforms and balls from Bergamo 1950, a professional rugby club from Italy.

The supplies consisting of 20 red uniforms with blue shoulder stripes, and four rugby balls, were donated by the Italian Series B League club in response to a request by 42-year-old Mario Bartorelli, himself a former Bergamo player, who served as the Ndugu Mdogo team’s founding coach.

Mario’s association with the team began when he visited the Ndugu Mdogo Rescue Centre in Nairobi’s Kibera slum while on a personal mission to adopt a Kenyan child into his family. Impressed to see a bunch of former street children playing his favourite sport right in the heart of Africa’s largest slum, Mario instinctively added them to his schedule of commitments, visiting often and eventually organizing them into a rugby team with himself as a volunteer coach.

For three months between January and March 2009, Mario moulded the new team. Training sessions were held at the RFUEA grounds along Ngong Road, where the boys adapted to the rules and techniques of the sport with bubbling alacrity, playing barefoot while wearing their regular clothes for lack of sporting attire. When Mario returned home to Italy, he implored his former league club to donate provisions that would help nurture the potential talent he had spotted at the Centre.

Rugby is one of the recreational activities pursued as part of the Ndugu Mdogo Rescue Centre’s rehabilitation programme. The nascent team has 23 boys – all aged between nine and sixteen - who have already been reintegrated back into the society after one year of rehabilitation.

“The rugby team is a great idea, because it teaches the children virtues like discipline, cooperation and teamwork,” says Jack Matika, a social worker at the Ndugu Mdogo Rescue Centre. “It is also therapeutic – it helps the children bond after the busy week in school. It also helps them readjust to the home environment they have just returned to after a whole year of formation,” Jack adds.

Other recreational activities at the Centre include soccer, scouting and acrobatics.

The continued engagement of such reintegrated boys in these activities enables social workers from the Centre to maintain contact and a steady follow up on the boys’ rapprochement with their parents or guardians.

Currently, the rugby team practices for two hours every Sunday under Coach Mary Mueni, a female tactician who volunteered to train the team after watching them practice at the RFUEA grounds under Mario’s guidance.

Although soccer is easily the most popular sport among many Kenyans, and despite the global celebrity of Kenya’s acclaimed marathoners, rugby has lately emerged as one of the country’s most popular field sports.  The Tusker Safari Sevens, an international rugby tournament held every year in Nairobi, has become one of Africa's premier rugby tournaments, and this year, Kenya’s national rugby team romped all the way into the semifinals of the International Rugby Board (IRB) Series leg in Hong Kong.

With the emerging prominence of rugby in the country, local and foreign professional leagues could one day become a source of employment for young Kenyans. About thirty per cent of Kenya’s population is unemployed, and with support and nurturing, sports like rugby could provide some respite.

Perhaps in pursuit of this dream, the Ndugu Mdogo boys don their new uniforms and show up at the RFUEA grounds for practice every Sunday afternoon.  They play, laugh and tease in apparent oblivion of the myriad cars swishing down the adjacent Ngong Road. As they sweat it out in the hot sun - and sometimes in the rain - their vivid red uniforms are almost a metaphor for their hope for a brighter future, a fresh start miles away from the harsh, decadent streets of Nairobi.