The federation's president, Yves Jean-Bart, battered and bruised but alive, is trying to run the organization from the only instrument of communication he has left, his BlackBerry. Nancy Lescouflair, president of the women’s soccer association and wife of Haiti’s minister of sports, has no idea why she was able to claw a way out when 32 others in the three-story building were buried alive in that earthquake.
The two presidents were spared, while everyone else in the building perished. Soccer, their life’s work, must be low on any list of priorities after the earthquake, but even so, if the sport is half the international “family” it professes to be, you would expect those who play and administrate the game worldwide to make some humanitarian response.
They are doing so.
Within days, Jack Warner, the head of the North, Central and Caribbean confederation of soccer, said he would give $100,000 of his own money to the relief fund. FIFA, the world governing body, gave an initial $250,000. Chung Mong-joon, a FIFA vice president from South Korea, pledged $500,000.
Within a week, famous players Zinédine Zidane, Luís Figo, Ricardo Kaká, Thierry Henry, Edgar Davids, Rui Costa and others agreed to take part in a United Nations charity match in Lisbon’s Stadium of Light for the fund. Sixty-five thousand people attended the game last Tuesday.
One by one, the players of Haiti’s national squad, were accounted for among the living. They had no infrastructure left. Their organization was buried beneath the once ancient house on Avenue Christophe, and their national stadium was occupied by thousands of the homeless. Who would help the sport, if not the sport itself?
As soon as it was possible to get to Port-au-Prince, Captain Horace Burrell, senior vice president of the Caribbean Football Union, went there.
“Words cannot describe what I have seen,” he reported back to FIFA. “It is heartbreaking. I have witnessed three bodies of our Haitian FF colleagues in a state of partial decomposition and still pinned by heavy concrete.” He implored his regional boss, Warner, to get out there and do something.
Burrell was not alone. Over the past week, this column received calls and e-mails urging action by FIFA. One such message came from John McDermott, a former Newsweek photographer who in 1998 went to Haiti with a FIFA development team.
The five men stayed at Hotel Montana, now completely destroyed by the quake. They spent days in the soccer building, now a tomb of rubble.
“The hardest, and best part of the week was visiting the SOS Children’s Village, an orphanage FIFA helped to build outside Port-au-Prince,” McDermott wrote. “Every one of us was moved to silence by that visit. The referee Alexis Ponnet had tears streaming down his face. Phillipe Redon, the French coach, brought joy to the kids organizing and playing a game. Even the tough Serb in charge of our group, Dusan Maravic, could barely speak.” The men told themselves they were glad to get out of Haiti. They would never go back except for necessity of work.
“Today,” McDermott now says, “I would go in a heartbeat if I could contribute something. But wouldn’t it be nice if the local FIFA bigwig, Mr. Warner himself, took the lead?”
For once, Jack Warner is ahead of the game. He flew into Haiti over the weekend. He landed in a private plane, with an armful of bottled water. He was taken around the devastated capital by Jean-Bart and Lescouflair. Before he left, he broadcast on Haitian radio.
“I have not seen everything, but I have seen enough,” he said.
Now a politician as well as a soccer administrator, Warner promised that, with FIFA’s assistance, Haiti’s soccer headquarters would be rebuilt. He said he would assist in payment of staff salaries. He would call on Caribbean soccer officials to open their houses to Haitian players and to help pay for Haiti’s youth teams to be housed in neighboring Santo Domingo.
And Warner, the man whose family travel company banked millions from an appalling ticket price hike at the 2006 World Cup, said he was on his way to FIFA House in Zurich to speak directly to its president, Sepp Blatter.
“I will be sending you a full report on my visit to Haiti,” he wrote to Blatter in advance. “And especially on the promises I made on behalf of the FIFA, Concacaf and C.F.U.”
Warner, this time, is hitting the right buttons. FIFA will rebuild a Haitian soccer headquarters, just as it financed and is attempting to refinance a stadium for Palestinians in Ramallah after Israeli bombing there.
One piece of good news is that the Children’s Village in Port-au-Prince and another one in the north of Haiti are still standing. They are run by SOS-Kinderdorf, which was founded by the Austrian Hermann Gmeiner. Soccer’s support of the organization is the sport’s longest standing real act of charity.
João Havelange, the president of FIFA at the time, signed the pact in 1995. Egidius Braun, Germany’s former soccer federation leader, committed to the SOS cause, and Germany’s mission for the last World Cup financed orphanage villages in six different parts of the world.
One way of financing that project was to fine any player at the 2006 World Cup who was shown a red or yellow card. Those fines helped build a village.
Next week is WOW 2010 — World Orphan Week established by Gmeiner’s foundation. Some 78,000 orphaned or abandoned children are housed in 500 Children’s Villages in 124 countries. SOS ambassadors include Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and a legion of soccer names from every culture.
There is no charity fatigue in the world’s game; no waiting for nature’s indescribable tragedy to move it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/sports/soccer/03iht-SOCCER.html?scp=14&sq=&st=nyt
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