Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR’s international team shares moments from their lives and work around the world.
Last summer while traveling through Europe, I ran into a childhood friend who told me about a group of grandmothers in central Kenya who had formed a soccer team to keep fit and to give hope to a generation of teenagers. Back in Nairobi, I had to find out for myself, and so last month, I took a bus north to the foothills of Mount Kenya.
Miriam Wangui spent 20 years doing humanitarian work at the United Nations in Geneva, came home, and last year opened a training center that included a soccer academy for teenagers. What she never planned for was grandmothers — she tells me they just arrived one Friday and said they wanted their own team. “It was just organic.”
At 72, Ann Wanjugu, in the center of this photo, is the oldest. She grins telling me she left her kitchen mid-cooking to run and register for a training session earlier this year. “Before, I could do a little work and get tired,” she says. “Now there are changes. I feel fit and I will not stop.”
I’ve played soccer most of my life. Watching Ann Wanjugu sprint past women young enough to be her grandchildren, I felt something I hadn’t expected — a renewed urge to get back on the pitch myself.
On weekends the grannies mentor teenagers at the center’s beauty school, some grannies trying nail polish for the first time. No uniforms, no proper boots. Just grandmothers and teenagers shaping each other — one sprint, one laugh, one first at a time.
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