Equipment

The equipment suffers heavily from the low quality playing surface and the environmental conditions. When footballs are purchased, we ensure that they are suitable for hard surface pitches. Even then, the equipment is quickly damaged. Damaged footballs are repaired and re-used.  

Many footballs are damaged by the Marabu plant, introduced into Cuba unintentionally. Marabu does bring one benefit: as an efficient source of bio-gas
 

Football Equipment
Only a few children have proper footwear for playing football, so many play barefoot, which is dangerous. Many improvised football pitches are littered with broken glass, so that football shoes often become quickly unwearable. As the photo shows, damaged shoes are repaired and re-used.

Making goal posts for children's football
This is challenging since the necessary raw materials (metal) are often not available or too expensive. Thus we have to some extent gone back to using wooden posts, which, however, are easily damaged.

 Construction plans...

Improvisation I

Improvisation II (a rope is used as the crossbar where there is not enough wood)

Making wooden goalposts...as wood is scarce in Camagüey it had to be collected by truck 2 hours away – a major challenge in Cuba

The bark is stripped...

You need a long time to find this kind of saw in Cuba

Freshly manufactured goalposts

Transporting goalposts, best by horse and cart

Goalpost production in full swing