The Scottish Football partnership has sent a container full of football kit to a children’s charity 30 miles outside of Nairobi, run by the Daughters of St Vincent de Paul charity.
The charity aims to provide schooling and sport opportunities to children. The container project started with an approach by Sister Liz Smith to SFP chairman James Clydesdale for support. Stuart McCaffrey, Secretary of the SFP, explained: “We had an empty container which we kept at Bernard Hunter’s yard in Edinburgh. “My predecessor Paul Barnes deserves an enormous amount of credit for pulling the project together. “Paul wrote to all SPL, SFL and SHFL clubs and asked them to make a donation.” Paul then went round all the clubs who wanted to donate and loaded the car with kit and then deposited it in the container in Edinburgh as he went along. Donations came in from an array of clubs across Scotland, including St Mirren, Queen’s Park, Rangers, Hearts, Aberdeen, Alloa, Celtic, Dundee Utd, Everton, Keith, Kilwinning Community Sports Club, Letham FC and Wick Academy. Other organisations which provided support included the Scottish Premier League , Scottish Football League, Scottish Womens FA, Cardinal sports, Vision Outsourcing, Anytime fitness solutions, Sibcas and the Ashwood foundation who donated £2,500 to pay for the container.
The Scottish FA played a role in facilitating the donations. Scottish FA head of football development Jim Fleeting said: “This has been an extremely worthwhile project which has benefitted the football set-up over there. “We were delighted to be asked to help out.” The container left Glasgow in early November of 2011 and arrived safe and sound, after many transportation delays, in April of this year. Sister Liz was on location when the container arrived. She said: “The children and youth were just so happy. The junior girls kept exclaiming Ngai! Ngai! which means God, God! when they saw all the kit and equipment. “They just couldn’t believe it. “New kit, boots , footballs. They all were so happy and grateful. It was really quite hard for them to express their joy, save their smiles.”
