[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 174 (Friday, December 14, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2313-E2314]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                TRIBUTE TO HOOPS SAGRADO (SACRED HOOPS)

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. HAROLD E. FORD, JR.

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, December 13, 2001

  Mr. FORD. Mr. Speaker, once in a while on this floor, we have the 
privilege to leave politics behind and recognize the outstanding 
achievements of Americans.
  So today I would like to pay tribute to a group of young Americans--
very close to my heart--that have become ambassadors of the playground.
  In 1999, my friend Bryan Weaver founded a non-profit group named 
Hoops Sagrado. Hoops Sagrado is a cultural exchange program that is 
using the game of basketball to help bring a better life to two groups 
with seemingly little in common, young adults from the urban center 
that is Washington, DC, and young Mayans from the rural western 
highlands of Guatemala.
  Despite the difference in cultures, the group share a common passion: 
They both love playing basketball. Hoops Sagrado is named after a 
Native American belief that all races are connected through the sacred 
hoops of life, and must live in balance with one another to survive.
  These young men and women are doing their part to fulfill what Dr. 
Martin Luther King said was ``Life's most persistent and urgent 
question is, what are you doing for others?''
  For the last two years I have had the great privilege of serving as 
an honorary chair of the Hoops Sagrado project, and was thus especially 
pleased to see that last week the Washington Post devoted a Metro 
Section series to Hoops Sagrado's mission in Guatemala. The series 
highlighted the hope that Hoops Sagrado brings to these young people 
from Guatemala and America, a disproportionate portion of whom are 
raised by single mothers, and touched by the scourge of violence.
  With great pride in the achievements of Hoops Sagrado, I urge all 
Americans to follow their example in touching young people, and review 
the Washington Post series published during the week of November 25, 
2001 and describing how they overcame hardship to build bridges of 
friendship.
  Finally, I would like to thank them and their sponsors Ben Cohen, 
Phil and Jan Fenty of Fleetfeet, and The National Basketball 
Association for the important and honest work they did as ambassadors 
on behalf of this country.

               [From the Washington Post, Nov. 25, 2001]

                     Ambassadors of the Playground

                            By Sylvia Moreno

       Two vans stuffed with tall, gangly teenagers, oversize 
     suitcases and boxes of basketballs wend sluggishly westward 
     from the Guatemala City airport on a muggy summer night, the 
     riders seeing this new world through the prism of the one 
     they just left.
       ``This looks like Georgetown,'' says 17-year-old Max Costa 
     as the van he rides in passes a few blocks of small shops and 
     boutiques.
       Moments later, whoops and hollers greet the sight of a 
     Wendy's, one of several fast-food restaurants on the 
     outskirts of the capital.
       ``This looks like the Adams Morgan part of town,'' Max 
     announces excitedly, as they pass strip malls punctuated with 
     neon signs and billboards advertising a Burger King and a 
     Domino's Pizza. ``That's straight, joe!''
       They get to the ancient and picturesque city of Antigua 
     close to midnight, and as they stroll the historical streets, 
     their minds are fixed on things such as finding a burger or a 
     hip-hop disco, They encounter neither.
       They are more than 3,000 miles from home--in body, perhaps, 
     not in spirit. This trip is supposed to show them that 
     there's so much beyond the `hood, but they're still looking 
     for home.
       The ancient colonial arch in Antigua is compared to 
     McDonald's. They it look at stunning examples of centuries-
     old Spanish architecture and Antonio ``Biggle'' Dupree, 18, 
     asks:
       ``Is that a church? That's big, dog!'' His friends call him 
     Biggle because he looks like one of their idols, the late 
     rapper Notorious B.I.G.--except Biggle has a baby face and a 
     soft voice.
       He walks through a small plaza lined by grand 16th-century 
     ruins--convents and churches toppled in 1773 by an earthquake 
     that forever changed the face of this former Central American 
     capital. But looking at the massive stone walls with small, 
     high-set windows, Biggie says, ``Imagine what it would be 
     like to be in one of these Guatemala jails.''


                             A Grand Vision

       That night was the first in a three-week journey to the 
     lush highlands of western Guatemala, a country of spectacular 
     beauty and stark oppression, poverty and hunger. Group 
     members came to play hoops, but they had been told they would 
     do much, much more.
       These African American teenagers--nine from the District, 
     two from Montgomery County--were to see some of the country's 
     most cherished sites, take Spanish classes, conduct daily 
     basketball clinics for Mayan children and repair basketball 
     courts for a poor, mountainside school.
       They had come as representatives of Hoops Sagrado (Sacred 
     Hoops), a fledgling nonprofit group whose leader hoped that 
     such an experience would instill leadership skills and a 
     sense of community service in disadvantaged youths through 
     playing and coaching basketball. For the players, it was a 
     free trip, a chance to get out of Washington, to see things, 
     to enjoy themselves. Their leader had a grander mission in 
     mind.
       Bryan Weaver founded Hoops Sagrado in 1996 after his first 
     visit to Guatemala, when he was struck by the role that 
     hardscrabble basketball courts played as social centers of 
     indigenous Mayan villages. He returned in 1999, bringing one 
     of the African American kids whom he coached in youth leagues 
     in Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights. Last year, he brought 
     three. He was convinced that African American and Mayan kids 
     could learn valuable lessons from each other. They are 
     unalike racially, culturally and linguistically, but they 
     face the same problems of bigotry, street violence and 
     relegation to the margins of their societies.
       Bryan expected members of his group to grow in self-
     confidence from coaching kids and to realize that they were 
     not alone with their problems--that others might have even 
     harder lives. And the Mayan youngsters, he figured, would 
     benefit from the court moves his players could teach and be 
     inspired to strive for more in their lives than a sixth-grade 
     education and recycling the meager lives of their parents, 
     grandparents and great-grand parents. To help the Mayan kids, 
     Bryan also started a scholarship program to help keep girls 
     in school past sixth grade, when free public education ends 
     in most indigenous villages, unlike in the cities, which get 
     enough resources to pay for public education through 12th 
     grade.

[[Page E2314]]

       He figured that this--the third summer of the program--
     would be pivotal.
       He had joined forces with directors of the Shiloh 
     Development Community, a teenage mentoring project in 
     Columbia Heights, and with the addition of the Shiloh group 
     was bringing the largest number of players yet to Guatemala: 
     11. He had included two girls, hoping that they would serve 
     as role models for the Mayan girls who also would turn out 
     for the basketball clinics.
       There were preparatory meetings, with Bryan telling the 
     players about Guatemala's indigenous Mayan community and 
     urging them to heed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 
     challenge: ``The most urgent and pressing question in life is 
     what are you doing for others.''
       He was focused on lofty ideals and aspirations. But the 
     players including one young man who, despite two previous 
     trips with him to Guatemala, was still fighting the lure of 
     the street--presented the kind of mundane and vexing problems 
     that young people sometimes exhibit: Stubbornness. Laziness. 
     Lack of common sense. Failure to think through the 
     consequences of their actions. Anger. Indifference to other 
     people and their problems.
       The oldest and the veteran of these trips was Sean Thomas, 
     23, who in his mid-teens was sent to a drug boot camp and was 
     slowly realizing that he needed to break out of Adams Morgan 
     to straighten out his life. He was flashy and street smart 
     but erratic--Just like one of his favorite ballplayers, 
     former Sacramento Kings point guard Jason Williams. Sean wore 
     his Williams Jersey in Antigua and tried out the little 
     Spanish he remembered from his two previous summers in 
     Guatemala: Vamos, chicas. ``Let's go, girls.''
       The first female Hoops Sagrado volunteer, 16-year-old 
     Carrie Sartin--a tall, thin Sheryl Swoopes wannabe, walked 
     the cobblestone roads of Antigua that first night, carrying 
     ``T&. Whiskers,'' a black and white stuffed cat she had 
     brought along. ``They have rocks as streets,'' she said 
     later.
       The guys also included Clayton Mitchell, a brash 18-year-
     old, who walked through Antigua's empty and peaceful central 
     plaza at midnight, pausing for a moment to advise the others: 
     ``Enjoy the night. You can't do this in D.C.''
       Dwayne Crossgill, 18, knew that. An all-around athlete, 
     Dwayne ran track and played football and basketball. He 
     longed for opportunities to get out of the District. He 
     thought that there was more to life than the view from his 
     second-story apartment in Columbia Heights, where he lives 
     with his mother. There, drug dealers stand on stoops and push 
     their wares. Dwayne had beard the occasional gunshot. He had 
     attended more than one friend's funeral.
       ``Living in D.C., I realize there's lot of bad in the 
     world, a lot of crimes,'' he said before he left for 
     Guatemala. ``It's good to see the there's other ways of 
     life.''
       Bryan eventually found out--the hard way--that teenagers 
     who don't know each other don't magically get along and that 
     even the most well-meaning adult counselors can clash. He 
     later realized that his charges were not as prepared as they 
     should have been about the culture and mores of Guatemala, 
     about how to talk, act and dress in a vastly different 
     culture. And he also discovered how hard it can be to 
     persuade a teenager that behavior or dress that is acceptable 
     in Washington could easily be offensive or provocative in a 
     Mayan village.
       But those lessons came later.


                           Trying to Connect

       Bryan had brought with him the autobiography ``I, Rigoberta 
     Menchu,'' and a few days after the group got to Guatemala, he 
     asked Sean to read to the group a paragraph from Chapter 1, 
     in hopes of setting the right tone for the trip. Menchu is a 
     Mayan who grew up not far from where the Hoops Sagrado team 
     was headed.
       During Guatemala's 37-year civil war, as she tells the 
     story, members of her family were raped and killed, like 
     hundreds of thousands of Mayan Indians. Menchu, living in 
     exile in Mexico, won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work 
     in promoting social justice and human rights for Guatemala's 
     indigenous people. The work has been criticized for 
     exaggeration and misstatements, although it has also been 
     widely praised as an accurate portrait of what it was like in 
     Guatemala in those years.
       Menchu was Sean's age, 23, when she told the story of her 
     life, a narrative that turned into the book. So Bryan hoped 
     the words would resonate with him, as well as the others as 
     they embarked upon their journey into the Mayan world:
       ``I'd like to stress it's not only my life. It's also the 
     testimony of my people. It's hard for me to remember 
     everything that's happened to me in my life since there have 
     been many very bad times but, yes, moments of joy as well,'' 
     Sean read haltingly.
       ``The important thing is that what has happened to me has 
     happened to many other people, too: My story is the story of 
     all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality 
     of a whole people.''


                        So Different, So Similar

       But that first night, Menchu's world was far removed from 
     these young people, armed with their headphones and gangsta 
     rap and hip-hop CDs. Their T-shirts bore the slogans: ``Thug 
     Life'' and ``Scarface,'' ``Kids and Guns Don't Mix'' and 
     ``Sexy.'' And on their feet they wore the equivalent of what 
     could pay for several school scholarships for Mayan children: 
     silver Nike Solo Flights and black patent-toe Air Jordans; 
     leather Reeboks and New Balance cross-trainers.
       What they did share with many Mayan children wasn't so 
     obvious: broken homes, families wracked by alcohol or 
     substance abuse, apathy and discrimination.
       Daily, the Hoops Sagrado team would travel a road up a 
     mountain to get to the village of Xecam and the basketball 
     clinics. It was a strain, up a steep and gutted road, marked 
     by hairpin curves and treacherous cliffs.
       But the real effort, it turned out, would come from within. 
     The road from Washington to Guatemala and back was marked by 
     tears, turmoil, anger, doubt and misunderstanding.
       Dwayne's favorite T-shirt was imprinted with the words of a 
     Swahili slogan that bore the prophecy for this group. ``Life 
     has meaning only in the struggles,'' it read. ``Victory or 
     defeat is in the hands of the gods. So let us celebrate the 
     struggles.''
       There were plenty of struggles ahead.

       

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