The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 2/9/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Photo by Caitlin Kinnett, illustration by Heidi Reitmeier

The young girls of the Budaburam Liberian Refugee Camp in Ghana, Africa -- barred from going to school, forced to care for sick family members and work in the fields to gather their own food -- had nothing to distract them from the struggles of everyday life before Luci Storelli-Castro arrived.

While attending the University of Ghana in the 2007-2008 academic year on an Academic-Year Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship, Storelli-Castro, a now-CSU graduate with degrees in political science and philosophy and former editorial columnist for the Collegian, volunteered at an elementary school and taught English to a class of 52 already bilingual and trilingual seven-year-old children.

Storelli-Castro went through what she described as several "rewarding" and "life-changing" experiences while in Ghana.

As she changed her life, however, she changed others'.

While abroad, Storelli-Castro visited Budaburam, a Liberian Refugee camp along the Ivory Coast. There, she met a multitude of people displaced by the Liberian Crisis, a now decades-old conflict in the West African country.

"One doesn't fully understand the degree of misery that they live in," Storelli-Castro said of the child soldiers, rape victims and people tortured during the war -- individuals in the camp who "had lost their livelihood and dreams."

With that in mind, Storelli-Castro took action in the best way she thought possible.

She developed a soccer team, with the help of three other refugees, for the girls of the camp -- the ones who had been hit hardest by their displacement, those who Storelli-Castro said appeared "vulnerable" and needed her.

"We started from scratch," Storelli-Castro said, explaining the challenges faced when starting the team.

The camp had little supplies for soccer and the girls were ill-equipped. Other concerns were whether the girls would hurt themselves playing on the bare ground, littered with rocks and hard dirt and if they ate enough during the day to be able to play.

Together, the band of girls became the team Mapi, a pet name Storelli-Castro called her dad, who is an avid soccer fan. Over time, she worked with the players to get their minds off of their hardships and to "give the girls an outlet to be girls."

During her time coaching, a fellow foreign German exchange student asked to follow her to the camp. He filmed her work and is currently editing it into a documentary to air on German TV this year.

Continued...

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