Football for Hope: Pre-Festival Cultural Celebration Begins

Johannesburg, South Africa --

If one had just happened to walk into the Queen's High School auditorium on Wednesday night, you may have thought you were witnessing a talent show performance. But this was not just any talent show, it was one of the kickoff cultural celebration performances that is part of the FIFA Football for Hope Festival, which displayed that the participating youth are just as talented off the field as on the field.

Including performances by all thirty-two teams, the cultural component of the festival was alive and well with the participants getting to see a snippet of each of their peers' culture. This cultural component is crucial to the fostering of a long-term social awareness and works to prove that this festival is about a whole lot more than just football.

The home delegation, Team Alexandra from Play Soccer South Africa, kicked off the festivities and left the crowd wanting more – which is exactly what they got as their cheers convinced Team Alex to one more encore performance. Team Alex is proving to be the perfect cultural ambassadors for the host nation as they received some of the loudest cheers of the night, all with nothing but smiles on their faces as they certainly were enjoying themselves.

Following Team Alex, the audience was treated to traditional song and dance from the delegations from Lesotho, Ecuador, Paraguay, Rwanda and Cambodia. This was transposed with a few modern song and dance performances by the delegations from the UK, Ireland, France and Senegal. There was even a fire dancing performance by the delegation from Tahiti!

Before Team Alex performed, the night began with a spontaneous dance party to everybody's new favorite World Cup Song “Waka Waka” by Shakira and ended with an exciting display of capoiera by the Brazilian team. It's hard to judge which teams received the loudest standing ovation of the night, but what was evident for the naked eye was the way that every single participant was embracing one of the core ideas of the festival – bringing together a wide array of young leaders under the guise of football to engage them in cross-cultural learning.

The night was probably summed up best by the performance of Sport dans la Ville of France as they ended by introducing themselves each in a different language from a participating country.

While the participants have barely known each other for two days, it is remarkable to see the amount of overwhelming support that they consistently give each other. What began for these young role models as just a football festival, has for them turned into something that is so much more.

If they can play football anywhere near as well as they can sing and dance, we are certainly going to be in for a great week when the festival officially kicks off on July 4th!