Yesterday, the 19th Football (soccer) World Cup began in South Africa and we are all very excited about it. It is amazing the progress South Africa has made in just 20 years since it began the arduous road of becoming a democratic nation free from apartheid (the law to finally lend it came about in 1994.) It seems like yesterday that I was in my home in Milan, watching, with tears in my eyes as Nelson Mandela was freed from prison after almost 30 years.
Sports, like music, unite people and remind us of just how similar we all are. This World Cup is all the more important because of where it is taking place. There are countries participating who years ago had colonized Africa, amongst them, France, Spain, Italy, England, Germany, Portugal, and let us not forget the Netherlands. I pray for a successful World Cup for all of Africa and may the best team win! (Tonight, England versus the U.S.A. Can’t wait!)
My heart goes out to Madiba and the Mandela family for their terrible loss yesterday.
[...] The World Cup is well underway and my husband and I have been watching as many games as possible. The group stage where teams battle it out to get into the knock-out stage is coming to an end and it has been very interesting to see how the ‘weaker’ clubs are no longer so weak. By that I mean, the Europeans have always had this football supremacy attitude, looking down from their trophy-filled pedestals at the African, Asian, smaller South American teams (this excludes Argentina and Brazil, of course), and the United States. However, this year, more than ever, the levels seem to be evening out and this makes the matches all the more exciting. England is doing terribly at the moment, Italy is disappointing to say the least, France has been eliminated in the first round, and Spain was just plain sad. Whereas, the United States are playing really well, as are the teams from the Ivory Coast, Mexico, and Uruguay. I think this World Cup will have some interesting surprises. [...]