Africa-Press – South-Sudan. On Monday, the management of the Luol Deng Foundation, in partnership with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), launched South Sudan’s first-ever residential camp for teenage basketball players.
According to the authorities, the South Sudan Youth Camp Activity (SSYCA) is meant to “harness the power of sports to improve social cohesion, develop soft and life skills, and increase resilience among young people between 13 and 29 years old.”
The camp will start accommodating young players aged 18–23 years old on May 25–30, 2022. Meanwhile, those aged 13 to 17 years old shall be hosted from May 8–14, 2022, at the multipurpose training centre in Juba.
They will spend six days at the centre getting to know each other and creating strong and endurable friendships.
This is a great initiative created by the Luol Deng Foundation with support from the United States government through its development agency, USAID. This is very important because it creates unity among young children as they grow into adults, and this is referred to as primary socialization.
Due to the different factors, the current generation of South Sudanese has lost unity among themselves. It is now important to ensure that the young children are allowed to socialise to restore the unity of the next generation. You can testify that most South Sudanese who lived from the 1950s to the 1980s were more united compared to the current generation. Those people peacefully co-existed and lived freely in any part of Sudan without any problems. This was simply because they had been trained to live together right from their childhood.
The presence of many boarding schools in the then southern Sudan at that time played a great role in socialization, which in turn promoted unity among the citizens despite the conflict at that moment. Several secondary students could travel from the Equatoria region to study in Greater Bahr el Ghazal and vice versa. However, today there are only a few boarding schools in South Sudan compared to those days, despite the increasing number of people seeking education.
There is a need to establish more boarding schools to instil in them the spirit of unity among the children so that they can peacefully co-exist after completing their studies. So, we need to teach our children how to co-exist at their stages of growth so that they become peace-loving citizens when they become adults.
The current generation has already lost unity among themselves, and the focus should now be on the young children. That means the government has to establish more social facilities, such as boarding schools and child-friendly spaces for creative activities, to have more united citizens in the future.
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