Shoes for Bokoji
The Philipp Lahm Foundation presents shoes in Ethiopia
It took a lot of time and hard work, with endless bureaucratic hurdles to be overcome along the way, but in the end everything worked out. This was in December 2008, and it was the Philipp Lahm Foundation’s first project in Africa. Foundation trustee Dr Cornelia Schmoll flew to Ethiopia with TV-reporter Alexander Göbel, whose reports on Ethiopian runners’ harsh training conditions had set the campaign going. Together they brought the project to a successful conclusion and handed 350 pairs of running shoes over to young sportsmen and sportswomen in the Ethiopian highlands.
Cornelia Schmoll’s report on her travels to the “cradle of long-distance running”
The dusty track ahead snakes its way through the fields of the Ethiopian highlands, endless red-brown sand and gravel. We – Axel Göbel (Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcasting station), Tadesse Engdaw (our contact man in Ethiopia), our two jeep drivers and myself - are on the road to Bokoji, a village with a population of approx 17,000 some 105 km southeast of the Ethiopian capital Addis Abeba.
We want to meet the children and young people here who all share one dream: to become successful runners. And this is where the world’s best long-distance runners come from - Haile Gebrselassie, Kenenisa Bekele, Tirunesh Dibaba are just a few of the great names from Bokiji and the surrounding villages.Our project has been supported by the Hamburg Society for Promotion of Democracy and International Law and by “Menschen für Menschen” (“People for People”), the charity founded by the actor Karlheinz Böhm.
Our project would not have been possible without their support. There’s no tarmac road to Bokoji, which lies at 2,000 metres (some 6,000 ft) and is pretty much cut off from the rest of the world. The overhead power lines look like something from the distant past. It is 6 o’clock in the morning. We pass the occasional village or group of houses, mainly mud huts. I find myself wondering how these dwellings survive the rainy season, which hits the whole area hard twice a year.
Running – the people’s sport
There are no cars here, and the two-wheel horse cart is the main form of transport. We keep encountering donkeys, carrying either people or loads. There is no drinking water supply here, so it is all transported in heavy canisters loaded onto the backs of these hardy little animals. On arrival in Bokiji we decide to go straight to the “stadium” because we don’t want to miss a single minute of the morning running training.
Running is the most popular sport in Ethiopia – and not just because it gives the young people in the highlands the hope of being picked for a team and making a career far away from the poverty at home. What means so much to them is that by training together they develop a feeling of belonging, experience a feeling of success, and gain respect and admiration from others. This is why it’s so important for us to support them: it’s a sustainable way to help them to help themselves. It imparts self-confidence and a goal in life to these young people who grow up with no perspectives.
What means so much to them is that by training together they develop a feeling of belonging, experience a feeling of success, and gain respect and admiration from others. This is why it’s so important for us to support them: it’s a sustainable way to help them to help themselves. It imparts self-confidence and a goal in life to these young people who grow up with no perspectives.
It is these positive values that we want to promote, which is why we are standing here in the middle of the Bokoji stadium beside our two jeeps filled to the brim with brand-new Adidas running shoes. The stadium is a grassy space with an oval running track mown into it. The spectators’ seats are grassy mounds of earth alongside the track, with traces of rows just visible. At this early hour of the morning there are about fifty young people sitting here watching.
Discipline and Commitment
In the course of the next two hours their numbers grow to way over three hundred. The young runners sit quietly, all very disciplined. They wait for in their trainer to give them instructions. He is an elderly man with a friendly face and they lovingly call him “coach”. He has been training the young people for years, day in, day out, with absolute devotion – and without any pay. The runners are very poorly equipped: their shoes are worn out and often only held together with coarse wool and sticky tape. Their clothes are a far cry from sports kit as we know it - nothing fits, and it’s anything but clean. A lot of the kids come to training in woollen sweaters or cardigans full of holes.
The training session gets going. The runners race round the track in small groups, divided up according to age and ability. I have never seen such discipline and enthusiasm among young sportsmen. They are proud, incredibly proud, to be showing us what they can do. Their broken shoes and torn clothing are long forgotten. It’s time for running.
After a shortened training session of about an hour we decide that it’s time to start distributing the shoes we’ve brought. We get them out of the cars and sort them according to size. The runners look on in amazement. So many shoes, and they’re being given them as presents, here, where nobody ever gives them anything. The coach and his assistant get out big ledgers with the kids’ names and training results.
Orderly distribution as the crowd jostles
We begin distributing shoes according to the lists. It all starts in a calm and orderly manner, but as our pile of shoeboxes shrinks, the waiting runners become more and more impatient. Some of them seem to be afraid that they’re going to be going home empty-handed. It gets noisier. The sun beats down. The kids start pushing forward. I no longer know where to reach out first. The coach calls the kids to order and it gets quiet again, at least for a few minutes. Orderly distribution, then frantic jostling, then a sharp word from the coach: the same game over and over again for another three hours.
At last we’ve handed out all our shoes. The young runners are absolutely thrilled. A young German football star is doing this wonderful thing for them - it surpasses their wildest dreams. I watch them running round the track in their new shoes, beaming with delight. It’s wonderful to see these happy faces. Then five minutes later the jostling starts again.
They start singing for Philipp Lahm and his Foundation. They thank him, shouting out their thanks across the hillside. The coach comes over to me and asks a favour: the young athletes want to have a poster of their new hero to spur them on in the future. At last they have the feeling that there is somebody out there who believes in them. Their pride is written all over their faces and we know that we’ve done the right thing.
- Flash is required!
DW-Radio report: "Schuhe für Bokoji" (Alexander Göbel; Dezember 2008)
Press conference in Munich
Alexander Göbel (Deutsche Welle reporter), Dr. Cornelia Schmoll (Philipp Lahm Foundation), Miodrag Soric (Deutsche Welle radio’s editor-in-chief), Tilo Braune (Hamburg Society for Promotion of Democracy and International Law); © Bayerischer Rundfunk / Deutsche Welle / Fotograf Ralf Wilschewski
High up in the Ethiopian highlands, Bokoji is the „cradle of long-distance running” and home to some of the world’s greatest marathon champions. The youngsters here dream of following in the footsteps of their idol Haile Gebreselassie and run everywhere they go – herding cattle, collecting firewood, fetching water, racing to school.
The Philipp Lahm Foundation became involved in the hardships faced by these young athletes following a TV documentary by Alexander Göbel (Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcasting station), about young Ethiopian runners and their dreams of careers as professional sportsmen. He reported on the harsh conditions they face in their daily lives and above all in their running training – without running shoes on the rough red stony terrain.
An initiative was started to provide these young athletes with basic equipment, and both the Philipp Lahm Foundation and the Hamburg Society for Promotion of Democracy and International Law agreed to support the project. There were some major bureaucratic hurdles to be overcome along the way: Adidas was willing to donate running shoes, but customs duties and transport problems made it impossible for these to reach Bokoji.
The problem was finally resolved by Cornelia Schmoll (Philipp Lahm Foundation Trustee) travelling to Ethiopia with Alexander Göbel in December 2008. After buying hundreds of pairs of running shoes in the capital Addis Abeba, she made the journey into the highlands and distributed them personally to the young athletes on the Bokoji training ground. See also: Cornelia Schmoll’s report “Shoes for Bokoji”