Ludden: African trip 'enlightens' Bowen

[Solid D]

http://www.mysanantonio.com/sports/b...n.365e0c5.html

Web Posted: 09/12/2006 12:49 AM CDT

Johnny Ludden
Express-News Staff Writer

As one of the NBA's most versatile defenders, Bruce Bowen has guarded everyone from Kobe Bryant to 7-foot Dirk Nowitzki. His goal is always the same: Stay in front of his man. Keep a hand in his face.
That strategy apparently doesn't work quite as well against elephants.

Bowen found himself staring down a herd of the 15,000-pound beasts Saturday morning at a South African nature preserve. He had no interest in taking a charge.

"I flopped on this one," Bowen said, laughing.

Bowen and his wife, Yardley, spent the past week in Africa as part of the NBA's Basketball Without Borders program. He called the trip one of the most "enlightening" he has taken — and not just because he had the opportunity to feed the wildlife.

"I've been a lot of places," Bowen said by phone from Johannesburg. "I've visited my in-laws in Cuba, I've seen people who are just surviving on their spirit. But some of the things I saw here ... "

Bowen was among 12 current or former NBA players selected to serve as coaches at the camp. Spurs general manager R.C. Buford and director of pro player personnel Dell Demps also helped direct the camp, which brought together Africa's top teen-age players.

Two years ago, Buford invited one of the African camp's participants, Alexis Wangmene, to live with him in San Antonio. Wangmene, who played the past two seasons at Central Catholic, committed to the University of Texas last week. He is expected to join the Longhorns for the 2007-08 season.

In addition to working at this year's camp, Bowen helped dedicate a new dining facility at Ithuteng Trust, a school for impoverished children. Many of the children are orphans and have been victimized by sexual abuse or the region's political violence.

The players also visited a ho e for children living with AIDS, a shantytown where the residents' only electricity came from an old car battery, and the Apartheid Museum.

"I wish I would have been able to learn a lot of this history in school," Bowen said. "Basically, all we had heard about Nelson Mandela was when he was released."

During his visit to Ithuteng Trust, Bowen was surprised to learn one boy had been asking to meet him.

Said Bowen: "When I saw him, he yelled, 'Bruce, what's up baa-bee?' It seemed like he learned all his English from television."

Basketball's popularity hasn't grown nearly as fast in Africa as in Europe and other continents because of the lack of facilities and infrastructure. Bowen visited one basketball academy in Senegal where the gym didn't have lights.

"But the kids were still in there playing like it was the Forum," he said. "If they could get someone to teach them the fundamentals and coach them — a lot more than we could do in a week — the teams here would be dominant."

Before leaving for Africa, Bowen watched his own country lose in the semifinals of the world championships. Bowen was the last player cut from the U.S. roster but hasn't ruled out trying to make the team for next summer's Olympic qualifying tournament.

"I felt like I could have helped, but you never want to see them do poorly," he said. "I was disappointed for them.

"I'd love to still represent my country, but that's not up to me."
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San Antonio Express-News publish date Sept. 12, 2006

[Solid D]

A search on Ithuteng Trust in South Africa produced this site and article. It's difficult to imagine what some of these kids go through from day to day.

http://www.smiling-children.de/en/it...p?nav=6&sub=14

Ithuteng Trust
Development and Expansion of Ithuteng Trust



Ithuteng means learning in the language of the Shoto. The Ithuteng Trust, a charitable organization, was founded 1990 from the teacher Jackey Maarhohanye in Soweto, a district of Johannesburg, South Africa.

The primary purpose of the Trust was to make school education possible for the simple agricultural labourers aged 20 to 75.
Her successful work with the agricultural labourers encouraged Miss Maarohanye to widen her work on to prisoners.

During her work in jail Miss Maarhohanye recognized that the prevailing number of teen prisoners were aged under 20! Jackey Maarohanye couldn’t accept this grievance any longer. On grounds of this she decided in 1998 to devote herself completely to the children on the streets. That’s how Ithuteng Trust became a training and support programme for teens.


Mama Jackey, as Miss Maarohanye is today lovingly called by the children, looks after hundreds of teens which seem to slip off into a criminal environment or have already been there.
But also young people who got victims of violent crime find new hope in Ithuteng Trust.
It is mostly girls aged 7 (!) to 20 that got raped and who Mama Jackey cares for. It’s an open “secret” that about 80% of black girls and also boys get abused up to the age of 12.
Under the aegis of Mama Jackey and her comrade-in –arms these desperate children get help. Therefore she gets help from young people who themselves got new life perspectives through Ithuteng Trust.

As trust from children against adults is often disturbed children help each other and the elder ones teach the young. In the last three years all pupils (circa 50 per year) achieved their school qualifications, a sensation which even made the acting president Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela report about the success of the Trust.
Governmental schools don’t show such excellent results by far.

Miss Maarohanye is searching in about 150 schools in Soweto systematically for apparently lost causes and takes them under her care.
So far about 2500 children could find a new perspective through this. They are all successful pupils and they perform voluntarily social services in orphanages, hospitals and at work with drug addicted.

Today the buildings of the Trust are in Soweto. At present circa 80 teens can be housed there. It’s not seldom that two children have to share one bed.

Even though the work of the Trust received high approval the work isn’t supported by the government.
Local companies, for example the supermarkets Score and the South African Telecom support the ins ution with money and mostly properties. But this isn’t enough by far to care for all children and give them an accommodation. At present around 150 children stay on the terrain of Ithuteng Trust during the day. Half of them has to go home in the evening as a result of lacking accommodations. The children leave the terrain in tears, knowing that they will probably get raped in the coming night. A smile is on their face as they find admittance again the next morning.

The children are not only shown the way into future but also the awareness of their ancestry. They learn their root dancing and customs as well as the construction of houses like their ancestors used to do. The houses and cottages can be looked up on the terrain of Ithuteng Trust and they are occupied by the children.

Smiling Children e.V. has set the target to make systematically those means available that allow to accommodate as many children as possible. On the project list you can see our next steps. Two of our voluntary workers look after the projects on the spot and care for a reasonable and accurate application of funds. They authorize companies to deliver the needed things or to construct them. After the accurate realization of a job the companies are directly paid from Smiling Children e.V.. It can be mentioned praising that many companies reduce their prices when they get to know the aims and prosperities of Ithuteng Trust.

You can download further information about Ithuteng Trust here:

[Kori Ellis]

[NuGGeTs-FaN]

i cant wait to get back to Africa next year. Im so blessed that i have the opportunity to go and live there

[boutons_]

'It's difficult to imagine what some of these kids go through from day to day."

South Africa has been descending into a murderous for sometime, to say nothing about rape and very widespread AIDS.

=======================

August 26, 2006

South Africans Murders Hit Scary Rate

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:06 p.m. ET

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- Watch your back in South Africa. They kill folks here. Murder them at a bewildering rate.

Robbers kill their victims, bystanders kill criminals, family members kill each other.

Gunbattles erupt on streets and in shopping malls. Passers-by whip out pistols and join in firefights between criminals and police or security guards. A recent flurry in high profile bloodshed even has police suggesting they are losing the fight with violent crime.

Plans for South Africa to host soccer's next World Cup, in 2010, has focused international attention on the crime rate, with organizers having to answer questions not just about whether they'll have enough stadiums and hotel rooms, but whether the 350,000 foreign visitors expected for the monthlong tournament will be safe.

Statistically a South African is 12 times as likely to be murdered than the average American and his chances of being killed are 50 times greater than if he lived in western Europe.

( Damn! the USA has even lost its le as World Champion Murderers, truly a sport every country can play )


''This is an extraordinarily violent society and nobody understands it,'' said Peter Gastrow, a crime analyst at the Ins ute for Security Studies in Cape Town.

There are plenty of theories, many tied to South Africa's unique history and the belief that the struggle against apartheid created a culture of lawlessness, Gastrow said.

''The reasons seem to be unbelievably complex. There is no explanation that makes sense. The million dollar question is, 'Why?' If we could understand that we could start to fix it. But we can't. All we can do now is ask religious people to pray for us,'' he said.

The government contends it has made progress, reducing some types of crime and leveling off others. Still, after recent highly publicized cases, including the deaths of 17 people in just two incidents in June and July, the government had to promise a much tougher stance, saying police will be much more aggressive.

( When I visited S. Africa on business a couple years ago, a client have mine had been carjacked out of his BMW 500 at a stoplight. He said most whites believe the (black) police are among the biggest firearms dealers, re-selling confiscated guns back to the criminals. The NRA would be extremely pleased in such high level of arms traffic )

At the same time, the government tries to reduce attention paid to crime by having police release crime statistics only once a year.

The last statistics available showed that between April 2004 and March 2005, 18,793 people were murdered in South Africa, an average of 51 a day in a nation of 47 million. There were 24,516 attempted murders, 55,114 reported rapes and 249,369 assaults with grievous injury.

The government has not released newer figures, but contends there have been slight improvements.

Gastrow said studies show the levels of anxiety about crime are higher now than they were in the 1990s when violent crime was at its peak. People don't trust the government figures, and there is an ac ulation of fear from years of horrendous crime, he said.

South Africans, especially whites, are among the best armed private citizens on Earth.

There are approximately 4.5 million registered firearms in the country, including more than 2.8 million handguns. The government estimates there also are 500,000 to a million unregistered firearms. Tens of thousands of the weapons are reported stolen each year, feeding a flourishing underground market in illicit arms.

Gun Free South Africa, a private gun-control advocacy group, says more people are shot and killed in South Africa than die in car accidents.

Under apartheid it was easy for whites to buy firearms. But since the end of apartheid in 1994, the government has tried to tighten controls. Parliament approved a system of phased controls, setting deadlines for various steps in making gun ownership increasingly difficult.

But Gastrow said bureaucratic delays and entanglements have pushed back all the deadlines to the point of being meaningless.

In Johannesburg in June, cops and robbers shot it out for hours in what has become known as ''the Jeppestown massacre.'' The gunmen killed four captured policemen, riddling their bodies with bullets. Two of the officers, knowing the end was near, died together, embracing each other as they were repeatedly shot. Eleven suspects were killed.

Armed robbers also recently held up a children's soccer match at a private elementary school, holding the preteen players at gunpoint while accomplices stole cell phones, money and jewelry from parents and players.

Shaun Dennison, the owner of a small hotel and a police reservist, said robbers often just shoot someone during a robbery so the first phone calls after they leave are for medical help rather than police.

Several years ago, a robber held a gun to Dennison's head during a robbery at a used furniture store and pulled the trigger twice. Both times the gun misfired, he said, so the robber pistol whipped him and then ran with his five accomplices. Dennison pursued.

''We were just standing in the middle of the street shooting at each other. We kept shooting at each other until I killed one of them and the others tried to run away,'' he said.

He ended up killing three of the robbers and the other three escaped. One bystander was wounded. Dennison was briefly charged with murder but not arrested. Under South African law the charge was a technicality required until a magistrate ruled the deaths were justifiable homicide.

( aka "guilty until proven innocent" )

The minister for safety and security, Charles Nqakula, provided a blemish for the government's public relations effort when he suggested not long ago that people who complain about crime should just leave the country.

( "love or leave it" now, where have I heard that before? )

He spoke shortly before the Jeppestown massacre. After that, a shaken Nqakula publicly urged police officers to ''use firearms to defend yourself and the lives of all peace-loving South Africans.''

Rank and file officers, concerned that 54 police comrades were killed during the first six months of the year, held a demonstration to demand more powerful weapons and increased training to cope with organized, professional and better armed criminals.

''They are killing us. We need protection from the state,'' Tinus Ntimane, the police union's regional secretary, told The Star newspaper in Johannesburg.


<http://www.ap.org/>Copyright 2006 The Associated Press


====================

Sounds like Baltimore or Detroit, or Nuevo Laredo !

[RandomGuy]

Africa is almost universally a humanitarian nightmare.

Maybe Bruce could get with the Gates Foundation and do some good.

(resists the urge to take a dig at our government for ingoring humanitarian crises)

[RuffnReadyOzStyle]

"Statistically a South African is 12 times as likely to be murdered than the average American and his chances of being killed are 50 times greater than if he lived in western Europe."

So an American is 4x as likely to be murdered as a Western European. That's also pretty scary.

"held a demonstration to demand more powerful weapons" - yeah, that'll do the trick!

What a disaster. Unlike the Middle East, South Africa's problems do not seem to be religiously motivated. It seems to be more a case of rich v poor (all the incidents in that article were property related), and maybe some "let's get revenge on whitey" post-apartheid. It's obvious the entire social order has broken down, and who knows how you recover from that?

It's not a place I'm going any time soon. I like my safe, cushy little corner of the world.

[NuGGeTs-FaN]

It's not a place I'm going any time soon. I like my safe, cushy little corner of the world.

most people do. They choose to ignore the plight of millions of people around the world. Its ashame coz there is more than enough money and resources in the West to ensure that poorer people in other countries (even the poor in the western world) have opportunity to live a decent life.

South Africa is an amazing country with amazing people. Its just ashame that its so riddled with aids, drugs, racism and crime that drives people to have to take drastic actions to feed themselves.

[angel_luv]

http://www.mysanantonio.com/sports/b...n.365e0c5.html

Web Posted: 09/12/2006 12:49 AM CDT

Johnny Ludden
Express-News Staff Writer

As one of the NBA's most versatile defenders, Bruce Bowen has guarded everyone from Kobe Bryant to 7-foot Dirk Nowitzki. His goal is always the same: Stay in front of his man. Keep a hand in his face.
That strategy apparently doesn't work quite as well against elephants.

Bowen found himself staring down a herd of the 15,000-pound beasts Saturday morning at a South African nature preserve. He had no interest in taking a charge.

"I flopped on this one," Bowen said, laughing.