Watching the World Cup from a Nicaraguan pitch

Bill San Antonio

While most Americans watched this year’s World Cup from their local watering hole or by sneaking in a few minutes here and there at work, Wheatley High School seniors Jade Marcus and Jared Rothstein took in the action from a secluded village in Nicaragua.

The pair spent eight days in early July building a soccer field for residents of El Castillo alongside a team of volunteers from Mitzvah Corps, an extension of the Union for Reform Judaism that helps pair teenagers with service opportunities.

And this February, they plan on going back.

“They were playing soccer without shoes on a concrete field with these deflated 30-year-old balls that are just not useable. They were mixing concrete for the field without gloves, and they don’t even realize [the health risks,]” said Rothstein, of Roslyn Heights. “We want to eliminate some of that inconvenience.”

Rothstein and Marcus, each members of Temple Sinai of Roslyn Heights’ youth group SORTY, have begun a fundraising initiative through YouCaring.com to collect $7,500 to purchase athletic and basic construction equipment for another major building project in Nicaragua.

“Soccer and baseball are their two most important sports, and when we went a lot of kids were using broken bats, none of them really had mitts, they had one soccer ball,” said Marcus, of Mineola.

“It didn’t really phase them, and that affected me,” she said. “The things that are really important to us here are very trivial to them over there.”

Marcus and Rothstein were first inspired to join Mitzvah Corps after meeting with the organization’s assistant director, Jonah Freelander, at Temple Sinai earlier this year.

But convincing their parents to allow them to travel to the Central American country took some work, they said.

“Yes, the ‘going-to-Nicaragua’ part, they were hesitant about,” Rothstein said. “But this program has gone there before and community service is pretty important to me. When I find something I want to do, I decide I’m going to find a way to do it, and within a few weeks they said go ahead.”

Said Marcus: “My mom initially said no, but I knew it was something I needed to do and that it’d be a great experience. I got them to say yes.”

They left for Nicaragua on July 8, first on a flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Miami, where they joined their Mitzvah Corps comrades and caught a connecting flight to the Nicaraguan capital of Managua.

After another nine hours of travel by van and boat, Rothstein and Marcus arrived in El Castillo.

“We really didn’t know what to expect. It’s Nicaragua, it’s the middle of nowhere, it’s a bit scary,” Rothstein said.     

“But once we got there, you realize how different El Castillo is from the rest of Nicaragua,” he said. “They were all coming up to us, wanting to meet these tall, white Americans that they hardly ever see, so happy we were there to help them.”

They set to work atop a hill on the edge of town, building a concrete soccer field that they said would make for better playing conditions than the marshy village terrain within the village.

“We carried 30-pound cement blocks uphill almost a quarter of a mile, I crawled under barbed wire, I went through barbed wire, I jumped through a river, I crossed a deteriorating bridge, just to get to where the field was located,” Marcus said.

The typical workday would begin around 7:45 a.m. and end at noon when it would often become too hot to continue. Labor consisted of leveling out the field and pouring concrete over it.

“We stayed in what they consider hotels, these buildings made of wood whose walls weren’t even attached to the roof. Families slept on the bottom floor,” Marcus said.

“Girls slept with mosquito nets over their beds. Mine had holes bigger than my fist,” she said. “I’d come home from work each day and be so exhausted I didn’t care about the bugs in my bed.”

Despite the village’s remote living conditions, the entire community caught World Cup fever, Rothstein said.

When Germany and Argentina squared off in the tournament’s final match, Marcus and Rothstein watched from a hotel that had a projector screen.

When Germany’s Mario Gotze broke the scoreless tie late in extra time, the hotel lost power.

“We heard screaming coming from the other side of the village, and then this lady came in and told us,” Rothstein said.

Two days before they were scheduled to leave Nicaragua, Rothstein and Marcus approached one of Mitzvah Corps’ staff members, Lauren Belferder, who is also the temple’s special education and youth coordinator, about a return trip in February.

“We didn’t want to leave. We were so close with everyone there. We just didn’t want to leave,” Rothstein said. “We just thought about how much easier it would be if they had what we have here in the United States.”

They plan to purchase new or gently used baseball equipment and soccer balls, shovels, gloves and boots.  

Marcus said they have already received 49 baseballs and 39 soccer balls from a Sinai congregant, and that they’d like to build a storage shed in El Castillo using the money donated.

“The only problem we’ve had so far is shipping. We haven’t really laid out how we’re going to collect supplies from people yet, but we’ll figure it out,” Marcus said. “I can’t wait to go back.”

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