Area girls soccer players taking ‘a trip of hope‘ to Cambodia

http://www.heraldnet.com
TUESDAY, JULY 28
A local girls soccer team is heading to Cambodia to befriend and bring joy to girls their age through the language of sport

By Rich Myhre
Herald Writer

BOTHELL — Communicating in a foreign country can be difficult, but a group of area athletes has a special plan to reduce the language barrier on a forthcoming trip to Cambodia.

They’ll use soccer balls and smiles.

The team of 12 girls, accompanied by seven coaches and other adults, is leaving Seattle today and traveling to Battambang, the second largest city in Cambodia. They will spend two weeks befriending and teaching soccer to dozens of Cambodian girls, the majority being orphans and rescued victims of human trafficking.

“I really see this as a trip of hope,” said Eddie Carter of Bothell, who organized the journey with his wife Kari; they will be joined by daughters Whitney, 15, and Olivia, 12. “We want the (Cambodian) girls to know that there is a great future ahead of them, that their possibilities and dreams are endless, and that they are so much more than their past experiences.”

“My daughters are the exact same age as those girls, and it’s just disgusting to think what they’ve been through,” Kari Carter said. “It just breaks my heart. But now they’re out of that environment and in a better place. And even though that’s part of who they were, it’s not who they are today.”

The idea for the American visitors, she added, “is to love them unconditionally, and not to focus on what they’ve been through.”

This will be the fourth trip to Cambodia for the Carters, who were first there in 2005 as part of a Christian overseas outreach program. As soccer parents themselves, they came to see how the game could be both empowering and encouraging — not to mention flat-out fun — for young girls in a country of poverty, hardship and, not incidentally, longstanding cultural restrictions on females.

The Carters floated the idea of a trip to acquaintances in the local soccer community and received an enthusiastic response. The squad came together quickly, and is comprised of girls from select teams in Snohomish County such as Snohomish United and the Northwest Nationals of Edmonds.

The trip will cost each girl $1,240, with most of that going to air fare. “We’ve had a zillion garage sales,” Kari Carter said.

For the girls, the trip is a chance “to experience a different culture than ours,” said 12-year-old Raimi Pieters of Lynnwood, a seventh grader at Holy Rosary School in Edmonds. “It’ll definitely be a different experience, but I think it’ll be good. I think it will open my eyes more.”

“I think it’s going to be a fun and happy trip,” said Olivia Carter, a seventh grader at Mill Creek’s Heatherwood Middle School. “It’s sad that the girls were put through hard times, but (the trip) is just about caring for them and taking the time to do something with them, like playing soccer. It makes them happy and in return it makes you happy.”

“I think it’ll be interesting to see a different culture and to see what life is like for them,” said Winter Wirkkala, a 12-year-old eighth grader at Granite Falls Middle School.

Like her parents, this will be the fourth visit to Cambodia for Whitney Carter, a sophomore at Mill Creek’s Jackson High School. It is, she said, “a beautiful country. It’s had a troubled history, but the people are so nice. They’ll open their homes up to you and offer you food, no matter what. It’s a beautiful culture. A beautiful place.”

“The common ground is sports,” said Risa Pieters of Lynnwood, a 15-year-old sophomore at Edmonds-Woodway High School. “We obviously can’t relate to them because we’re coming from different backgrounds, and they’ve experienced a lot of different things from us. But soccer is still soccer. And it’s something we can share with each other that we can both have fun with.”

A Christian friend of the Carters who lives in Cambodia “has a goal of changing (the country) through soccer,” Kari Carter said. He wants “to take kids off the street and give them a purpose, and then have them go to school and get educated. And soccer is a part of that.

“There’s so much potential for how this could truly change the country, and the perception of girls and women in general,” she said. “You can truly change these girls by giving them their self-esteem.”

Many Cambodian children have very little in the way of personal possessions, so the team is taking lots of gifts, including colorful soccer jerseys to give to their new friends.

And as much as they expect to leave behind, Eddie Carter hopes the American girls come home with something equally precious.

“I really want them to return with a global perspective,” he explained. “What they have here (in the United States) is very rich and wonderful. It’s absolutely something that should be cherished. But at the same time, at the end of the day I want them to know that, ‘Hey, I’m blessed to be a blessing. I can use my resources and experiences of today to help those who are without.’”

And whatever language barriers exist, “we’ve found that no matter where you go in the world, kids are kids,” he said. “They find a way of reaching a common ground where they can connect, and they make that connection far sooner than adults do.”

Posted in: Khmer News