Charlize Theron links to soccer
Charlize Theron links to soccer
Posted: 2009-08-14 06:55
South Africa’s Oscar Award winning actress Charlize Theron has linked her Africa Outreach Project to a Los Angeles soccer club, Chelsea, and plans to build community soccer programmes for underprivileged children in South Africa.
In addition to soccer fields, uniforms and equipment, kids involved in the programme will receive health education and services.
The project will serve schools in South Africa’s Umkhanyakude District in northern KwaZulu\Natal, an area plagued by a high rate of HIV infection.
Theron says she is hoping to have the first fields built by the time the 2010 World Cup begins on June 11.
“The World Cup is a huge, huge thing for South Africans and for Africa. The pride Africans have of hosting this is tremendous,” Theron says. “The question is; how do we generate that into other areas and have more of an impact?”
Some of the proceeds from the recent charity match between England’s Chelsea and Italy’s Inter Milan at the Rose Bowl have already been donated to the programme.
Theron’s Africa Outreach Project has already helped bring mobile health units to rural Umkhanyakude, which lies some 360km northeast of Durban.
Children in the district have an almost 50 percent chance of being infected with HIV in their lifetime and health services are limited, at best.
With the mobile clinics, the pupils now have monthly access to nurses and counselors, education classes designed to prevent HIV and programmes that teach basic computer skills.
“When you give just a few of these normal things we have at our beck and call every day to a community, they want to take that knowledge and make it their own,” said Theron.
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