PeacePlayers South Africa Storybook FINAL - Flipbook - Page 25
the company 3M. "Just ahead of the meeting, we decided to take a car nap after a long drive on
the road. We overslept and found ourselves running inside to 3M's office 15 minutes late." Akhona
recalls. Luckily, 3M liked the dynamic duo’s respective personalities despite their tardiness. They
listened to their pitch and later agreed to financially support the organisation.
Nearly 3 years after Akhona graduated from UKZN, she became the organisation's first Managing
Director. She recounts times when some of the funding they worked for felt like it was slipping
away. Akhona recalls that there were “months where funders didn't pay until the end of the
month when payday was on the 25th. At times I didn't know how our 70+ coaches would get paid.
But by the 26th of the month, we always found a way to deliver and pay coaches."
Today, Akhona does anti-racism work, life coaching, and leadership development workshops for
schools and big corporations and Thibualt is now the Founder of Seawall Development where he
focuses on affordable housing. One of Akhona's most consistent clients today is one of the schools
she helped bring to Umlazi in her early Playing for Peace days, Clifton School. Akhona remembers
Clifton kids being excited to visit an Umlazi school and "singing the entire bus ride" on the way
to Umlazi. Once they got to Umlazi, she remembers the bus going "dead silent" because of their
unusual surroundings. Here Clifton was, a predominantly white school in a black township, for
the love of the game of basketball.
When reflecting on memories from PeacePlayers, Thibault says one of his fondest memories was"
the day that we brought 40 white kids from Clifton Primary School in Morningside out to the
township of Umlazi, and we had gone to meet with the school. We had told them about the
program. And they were really hesitant, this was a big ask. We got the national media - South
African broadcasting agreed to come out on the bus. It was your typical bus ride out like kids are
chattering. And the second you crossed into the township of Umlazi, and it was dead silence. We
pulled into the parking lot there, a dirt parking lot. And there were about 500 kids from the school
and community members outside. You could hear this deafening sound, and all 500 kids and
community members were singing the Shosholoza, which was kind of the illegal national anthem
from when Mandela was released."
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