Football coach Ian Wootton took his skills to Sri Lanka to teach children who have grown up in a tsunami-stricken city. He tells reporter CHARLOTTE MCDONALD about his trip.
EVEN though it is now more than four years since the Boxing Day tsunami, those affected still need help.
Ian Wootton, who runs Pro-Stars football school in Bromley, wanted something to do over Christmas and so volunteered to go to Galle, a city on the southern tip of Sri Lanka.
The 40-year-old said: ”At first I was shocked. It was the first time I had been in a third world country. “They had very little before the tsunami and now some have nothing.
“I would say that 25 per cent of the children I coached lived in orphanages or in other people’s homes.
“When I saw children playing with no shoes, I wanted to give them all things.”
Mr Wootton saw the devastation that the tsunami caused- the coastline where houses used to be and piles of rubble which have never been cleared away.
Some homes have been rebuilt but some people live in make-shift sheds where there homes used to be.
For the three months he was there, Mr Wootton lived with a family and taught lessons at Galle’s makeshift football grounds.
Mr Wootton, of Bromley Grove, Shortlands, said: “On my first day I was expecting 40 kids and I got 240.
“These kids turn up with holes in their shoes, or with no shoes. But to them this was a big thing.
“The children get schooling but they have no structured sport lessons.
“Every day I would have 75 to 80, you couldn’t stop them.
“Some of them were turning up an hour and a half early.
“I used to work 6 days a week, with just Monday to catch up and do my washing and things.
“I always felt that whatever I was I doing, it was not enough.”
Mr Wootton spent some of his time coaching at a hospital for mentally and physically disabled people.
He was told that when the tsunami hit, the patients couldn’t swim, so many of them drowned.
The Bromley coach said: “I wanted to make people aware. We all hear about disasters but over a period of time people’s memories fade.
“People think it has all been sorted out. Some buildings have been replaced but it doesn’t replace people’s lives.”
“When I first went out I had read a few bits but it’s nothing like seeing it with my own eyes.”
Mr Wootton says that he could not believe the gratitude of the children for the lessons he taught.
He said: “Half the time I couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand me but we loved playing football.
“It was a wrench to leave it. What I do here with my football, I get paid for, but also the children here don’t understand what it is to be poor.”
The coaches he worked with out there have continued the sessions, and he is keen to support them by sending more equipment.
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