Chanata Jean Francois features in One Day in Port-au-Prince, a multimedia documentary.
PORT-AU-PRINCE (AlertNet) - “See that woman over there? She’s a famous soccer player.”
Wilner, our translator, was pointing at a security guard standing by the entrance of a supermarket in the affluent Petionville district of Port-au-Prince. She wore jackboots and carried a truncheon.
We just had to interview her.
“I’ll do it if you give me a lift home,” she said. “Come back at six. And I don’t mean six o’clock Haitian time!”
Before the earthquake, Chanata Jean Francois, 35, was a goalkeeper for the Amazons, a professional female soccer club in the capital. Those days are over, but she still has the swagger of someone used to signing autographs.
A thunderstorm broke as we drove to her house on the Kenscoff mountain road, south of the city, where she lives with her teenage son, Malcolm.
Her two rooms were sparse but intact, thanks to their distance from the quake’s epicentre. A power cut forced us to do the interview by flashlight.
“Imagine now that everything is destroyed,” Chanata said, her baseball cap turned backwards. “All the soccer pitches are occupied.”
She’s right: almost a year after the quake, most stadiums in Port-au-Prince are still tent cities, home to tens of thousands made homeless by the quake. The national soccer federation’s headquarters and training grounds were completely demolished and more than 30 key coaches, players and officials killed.
Yet while soccer struggles to rebuild itself, its hold over Haitians is undiminished.
In the camps and on the streets, you see kids playing kick-about with anything that remotely resembles a ball. That was true even in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. One of the first signs of human activity I saw as I flew into Port-au-Prince two days after the quake was a glimpse of children playing soccer on a patch of rubble-free ground.
And even in those early days when power was still down, you saw dozens of Haitians seated around curbside satellite TVs run off generators. It wasn’t news they were watching. It was soccer.
“Soccer is the number one sport in Haiti,” Chanata said. “Any kid will stand up if you shoot a ball at him. Even if he’s a baby, he can stop the ball, he can hit the ball. I see it as love for this sport, and it’s also consolation. I think it’s both, but it’s more love.”
Chanata’s own love for the game began as a young girl, when she decided her destiny was to become a great goalkeeper.
“I chose that position because that’s how I was born: everything that’s neglected, that’s what I embrace,” she said. “The goalkeeper is the underdog’s position.
“Because in soccer, the one you see most is the attacker, the one who scores goals. You see the midfielder, the one who dribbles. Sometimes they speak about a good defender who made a nice tackle. To show how little the goalkeeper’s position is valued, there is a concept that says there are no good goalkeepers but only bad shooters.”
To refute the idea, she recalled her own strategy for stopping penalty kicks: study the enemy’s habits and try to mess with their minds.
“You have to prove not only that you are not scared of them, but that you fill the whole field. And you look at the ball, and you look the shooter in their eyes. You play with their psyche.”
Even in the dark, Chanata’s eyes were sparkling as she spoke.
“I miss soccer so much,” she said. “Even when I’m in my neighbourhood, by my house, if two or three kids are playing and the ball runs to my feet, I just have to keep it. And any little soccer game there is, I just stand and watch. And I coach them, telling them which position to play, what to do here, what to do there.”
It wasn’t the quake that made her give up soccer. She’d already quit after realising her work schedule and paltry pay were incompatible with being a single mother. But she had always dreamed of one day returning to the sport, maybe as a coach.
Then the earthquake came along.
“When I saw that the federation was gone – the coach dead, the federation president almost killed, and our soccer already lacked structure – I just said it’s over for me,” Chanata said.
She added bluntly: “It’s a dream I will never fulfill.”
