Chelsea FC Support

Football is life as you all know.

And Chelsea FC  donated a signed shirt to us…to help village girls for whom Football is quite literally a new life.

ChelseaShirt1
ChelseaShirt2

Girls like Gunja (seen heading the ball) were previously pulled out of education and married by the age of 15 because their parents could not afford school fees. Even worse, they disappeared from the playing fields of rural Bihar state where they loved to play football.

ChelseaShirt1 ChelseaShirt2

But Gunja no longer fears this fate. Her school fees are paid, she receives daily football training, nutritious meals, extra English and IT classes and competes in tournaments far from her village.
What’s more, when she has finished her schooling she can join a diploma course that guarantees her a job as an ophthalmic assistant at the largest and most successful eye hospital in the state of Bihar : the Akhand Jyoti.

The Akhand Jyoti Football Academy has over 60 girls involved in the scheme. Thirty are resident at the eye hospital. It costs £734 per girl per year.

Said 14year-old Gunja : “Football is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

Full story of the Mastichak girls in A Runaway Goat.

Huge thanks to ophthalmologist Prof. Phil Bloom who paid £1000 for the signed shirt and so many Chelsea fans who dipped into their pockets for smaller sums to contribute to funding  the girls.

Chelsea FC also donated 2 VIP packages for the Chelsea v Everton match on October 15 which falls a few days after World Sight Day 2011.

Thanks to Konrad Chapman who paid £2000 for this package enabling 100 people to be cured of cataract blindness.