Summer of Peace 2012 TM : Johann Koss

Transcription

1 Summer of Peace 2012 TM : Johann Koss [0:00:00] All right, everyone, welcome back to the Summer of Peace and this is sports and Olympics week and we are just having an amazing time with just an incredible athlete following on the heels of this Summer Olympics. And today I am just thrilled. Today we have with us Johann Koss, a gold medalist, three- time gold medalist, and he is going to be speaking with us today about right to play the power of sports and play for the development, health, and peace. A little bit about Johann. He's a Norwegian speed skating legend and made world headlines when he won three gold medals at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympic Games and he's broken a total of ten world records over the course of his career. Johann donated a large portion of his winnings to the Olympic Aid, a fundraising organization created at Lillehammer and challenged fellow athletes to do the same. After witnessing the potential of sports to effect change in the lives of children, Johann founded Right To Play in 2000 and has pioneered the Sport for Development movement worldwide. He has won numerous accolades including honorary doctorates from the University of Calgary and Brock University and was named "One of the 100 Future Leaders of Tomorrow" by TIME Magazine and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Johann completed his undergraduate medical training at the University of Queensland and completed his executive MBA at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. So Johann, welcome and thank you for being with us on the Summer of Peace Telesummit. Thank you very much, Philip. It's just great to be joining you today and I'm excited about your program. Yehey, wonderful! Yes, Johann, each week we've been featuring different themes showing that there are many different ways to cultivate a culture of peace. And with the Olympics having just completed, we're really thrilled to have you as Olympian and we'd love to hear from you. What 1

2 inspired you as a young person to be a serious athlete and then set the goal of going for the Olympics? Well, I think it's just interesting going back all the years to I was a little kid. I was growing up in a very, very safe environment in Norway. I love sport but there was something about speed skating that's really appealing to me and I didn't really know why at that time actually. And I thought about it later. But then I saw some pictures of my parents watching it must have been in the Olympics or a world championship or something speed skating. And I see the eyes on them focusing on the black and white television screen and they can't get them off of it. And I kind of probably realized that if I want that type of attention I'd better become a speed skater. So I wished for skates for Christmas actually when I was seven years old and they were speed skates which is kind of unusual because people go normally get hockey skates or all those types of skates but I really want the speed skates. And it's a big sport in Norway though there's not a lot of people who do it. I was really fortunate because there was a club very close to where I lived and in Norway the sports system is built up at volunteer clubs you have. It's a community- organized and people are volunteering, mostly parents, etc. But the track itself was coordinated by the municipal city where I've stayed and it's a suburb above Oslo where I was growing up. And it was funny because, of course, the day after Christmas I was on the track and I remembered walking down on the ice and I saw this amazing and I was going to test my new skates. And as I'm walking off on the ice I hear this old guy yelling at me "Get off the ice! Get off the ice!" I'm of course incredibly scared. I was only seven at the time. And I realized he's just the master of the ice and he said, "You can't skate on that now because they're having a club championship tonight," that same evening and he's been preparing that ice for them all day and they wanted to make it perfect. So he said, "Come back tonight and you can skate with them. But now you have to kind of skate on the parking lot." And I went up on the parking lot. There was no ice up there except lots of sand. Of course, I tried it anyway; I didn't know the difference. Though that evening I came 2

3 back and the club which was the local volunteer club really took care of me and welcomed me, got me to go, I skated like 50 meters in the race. [0:05:20] But I've got the training schedule in the very, very young beginner's class. And I remember the first kind of activity teachers I had. He pulls me more and more out of the snow because I was falling off all the time and he pulled me up on the ice and all of them encouraged me to continue trying and skating. And that became my second home. I mean I went there several times a week and then during the winter time. Beautiful, beautiful. And I mean did you have - - Later, it was interesting because I mean as I grew up and my parents got involved with the club like parents should do and I got to go more and more then. I love the sport and that I wasn't really good at it though I love participating. I particularly like the culture of it and that kept going. But then in 1979, there was one guy from the United States who came to Oslo and skated the World Championship and he beat everybody. His name was Eric Heiden. I'm sure all the people listening knows him. He won five gold medals the year after in Lake Placid and he became my hero. He was like the incarnation of the greatness that you can imagine, that this is an amazing person who can do it. He was like my total idol and hero. And I remember after watching him win the World Championship the year before the Olympics in Oslo I was there with 35,000 Norwegians and we were all cheering on him on his first name and we made him Norwegian, I think. He wanted then to be one. That summer later, I was up on the farm to my grandmother. She at that time ran the farm and I always loved being there with her and I was walking around and one day she asked me, "Johann, you're awfully quiet today. Why are you so quiet?" And I said, "Well, I'm dreaming and I'm thinking." "What are you thinking about?" "Well, I want to be a world champion, an Olympic champion like Eric Heiden and I also want to become a doctor like my parents," and I said, "I want to help children in Africa." She looks at me and said, "Johann," like grandmother should do they say, "you could do all that, if you want to." And she knew I wasn't very good at skating. I was hopeless 3

4 if not talented. I wasn't really good at school either but she said, "You just have to eat well and work hard and you'll be fine." And the amazing part of that was she believed in my dream and let me dream and I think that made it possible for me to keep believing that I could potentially eventually become a world champion, an Olympic champion like Eric Heiden. And she could've said something totally different "Johann, remember, that's too much training. How are you ever going to be there? That's totally impossible." Or worst kind of dismissing everything. And I think that's because she believed in my dream I started believing in the dream and it has made able to set goals and targets and I trained more and harder and continued going for it even though I necessarily wasn't picked by the national team for talent or anything like that but that's fine. Beautiful, beautiful. And so it sounds like you must have just been making steady progress after that time or how long a period was it from that conversation with your grandmother that you really started to see success from the ice? Well, I mean that was about 11 I think, kind of 11, at that time. It's interesting too because my father taught me a lesson and he was constantly reinforcing that "Don't necessarily worry about your competitors." I mean you should have, of course, if you think that you want to win and I wanted to win. But he said, "I'm so happy if you improved a little." So he kind of made this little rule that every time I did a personal best he gave me encouragement. When I even got like a tenth or two every time I did a personal best with 100 th or 10 th of a second so it was kind of interesting. So I constantly kind of try to beat myself. And about five or six years later, all of a sudden I beat everybody in Norway. [0:10:11] So then it took a long time but for me it didn't seem like a long time. I seemed just like a progress. When I became a Junior, I started winning the Junior championships in Norway and then I started competing against the Seniors and I was far behind them. But then I managed to catch up to them as well. I was 21 and I won my first world championship. 4

5 How beautiful, Johann! My gosh, this is a wonderful story. How did you feel when you won that first championship? Could you just tell us a little bit about that? I mean that's quite an accomplishment at 21 years old. Well, it was pretty unusual. Speed skating world championship is all around for me and that means that you have four distances that you skate the 500 and then 5000 meter the first day, and then 1500 and the 10,000 meters the second day. So it's four very intensive races and they're all very close apart and you have to compete in them. The person who is the best overall time of the four races will be the winner. And I actually came in. In the first day I was like "Wow, this is great. I'm in the top three." I can maybe get a medal tomorrow. I remember the night before my second day I couldn't even sleep properly. But in the morning after I went in for my 1500 that morning and it was a good race. I had a very good race. And all of a sudden I still kept my position. I was actually in the second position overall and I realized then I had like actually three hours to prepare between the third race and the last race. And I remembered walking around. This was at Innsbruck in Austria. I took myself out of the stadium walking in the city because I was so nervous I had to go window shopping to think about something else. It's just was like "Okay, do I like that? Do I like that?" I really needed to think about something different than winning because if I thought about winning I probably wouldn't do it. And then I started preparing for the race and the only thing I started preparing for was like what am I going to do to do my best in this race and to keep myself within the time I need to do to be able to win. And I just managed to find all types of energy and mobilization and won after the overall of the four races. I didn't even win the last race but because the person who won the last race was even further behind me and didn't catch so I won the overall. And then people were even surprised "What! He's actually winning. He is the world champion." And in Norway that was a big deal because nobody had won the world championship. This was in '91 and they haven't won since '83 so there was a very, very excitement. Well, actually it was in I'm sorry, I should be saying the right year. And then four years later you're at the Olympic games and you win three gold medals. I mean tell us a little bit. I mean this is quite a 5

6 transformation from an 11- year old boy talking with his grandmother to ten years later just at the Olympics and can you just describe the experience of having the whole world watching you in being that successful? What was that [0:13:57] [indiscernible] like? Yeah, good question, Philip. As I was saying, as an athlete you are so focused on your own sport and yourself. After the world championship in 1990, I had a super series of feats. In '91 I became the world champion again. And then in Winter Olympics you have the outdoor Winter Olympics in '92. I actually came in as a favorite. I participated. I got one gold and silver there but it wasn't really what I expected to do. I hoped to do better even though an Olympic gold of course is fantastic. But in the same period of time, we all knew that we're going to have the Olympics at home at the home country in Norway and it was the Lillehammer Olympics. And every single person in Norway was watching the Olympics. Everybody was focusing. How can we actually do? And I was obviously going in. They're believing that I was going to be one of the favorites. [0:15:05] Before '92 I just got pancreatitis infection and that kind of set me off a little bit and some people were like "Okay, maybe he's not going to be so good as we hope." I was going to skate three races. And I remember about five weeks before the Olympics in '94 I really didn't skate well. I hadn't skated that bad since like '88, '89. I was far down the list. People started giving up on me and I started doubting that I could do it. And I remember after a race, this was in Switzerland at the World Cup, I walked up this ice, just shaking my head, throwing the skates in the wall basically and looking at the coach and I said, "I can't do this." And then he says, "Well, it can't get much worse," he said. I said, "Well, I bet it can." Sometimes, you want to prove what other people say, the opposite. But then I said - - so I asked him, "We have five weeks left. What in that race I just did where I was 18 seconds behind the winner (and that's a long, long distance from speed skating)?" So I went, "What did I do well?" and then my coach was brilliant. So he listed four things he really thought I did well. And I said, "That's so important to me to know because I don't believe I can skate anymore and I needed to know what you thought I did well." 6

7 And the whole next week and the week after, I only thought about the things I was doing well and I was improving slowly but steadily to the Olympics. And I remembered the newspapers writing, "Koss is not going to do this at all." But now with my focus and I think I started getting the belief back and as I walk to the starting in Lillehammer - - this was the day after the opening ceremony. There had been no major competition. No other Norwegians have been competing there except one and that was the Alpine skier Kjetil Andre Aaamodt and he lost the gold to the Americans by 400 th of the second. I remember he inspired me. But the most important for me when I was on the ice was I had this feeling inside my stomach that all of a sudden, all of the energy I built and flame came out. It came like this enormously strong feeling and I was like "Wow, I'm going to do my best." And I realized later, where did that came from? And there was one woman standing in the first row in the stand and she has never ever watched me race live before and it was my grandmother. And I know that because she believed so much in me and I got so much support from her, my family, that this made it all come true and I wanted just to show them my best. And it was so fascinating after even a couple of laps I almost thought it wasn't going to happen. And then my coach screamed to me "You need a good exit of that turn." I remember it's the only thing I heard him say and I say, "What a good exit? I'll definitely do the next one even better," and I manage to break the world record. I got the gold medal. So it's those small things that make the difference, a big difference between the gold and maybe a total failure. Johann, it is such a powerful story that having your grandmother there for the first time, that's very touching. Well, it's amazing and I have to say that she was always the person who supported me. It's so important for people in life to have people around you who always see the good in you and that's what we are trying when you write the plan - - I'll come back to that later - - because if you really want to create a better world, we can only do it in small increments and we can only do it if we believe that we can do it ourselves. Even when we are astray, if we're doing wrong things and not that talented like I was, if somebody sees that you can do something and believe in you, you start believing it yourself and that's so critical. And I say that to everybody and I mean it and you need somebody there 7

8 because we are all very good at finding things other people are not doing that well and we are so easy to criticize than encourage. [0:20:06] But I'm going to say also, I mentioned that, because I had two experiences in the Olympics and going back to the Olympics and the theme of promoting peace. It was amazing when you walk into the Olympic village and you hundreds and actually thousands of athletes from all different countries and you know you're competing against each other but you're actually friends. You have something in common. You've so much respect and so much fun. And it's so interesting because you learn so much from the different people, the different culture, their background, the way they're training, who they are and what they stand for, et cetera, etc. It's a total place of an example of how people it doesn't matter what background, religion, country, conflict ever they come from they can all be together in one place in harmony, in total peace. And that is I think what is the ultimate presentation of what the games can show is what the experience you have in the Olympic Village as the Olympic athlete. I mean obviously there is also a ton of fun. It is just such a place to be and then you honestly now are looking back knowing that you're in the early 20's and a lot of young people. You can just imagine what's happening. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I've heard one person say, "It takes a lot of cooperation to come together to compete" and it sounds like this is on a global scale. I imagine you have made a number of friends at the Olympics that you maintained over the years probably. Correct? Yes, I have friends from all around the world and that's what it does to you. Now, you have friends from many countries who are participating. Obviously, there are less countries at the Winter Olympics which actually make it even more intimate but makes it easier to make more friends as well though I mean there are still 3,500 athletes so there's a lot of people to get to know. But the greatness is you get to know people from other sports as well, not only your own sport, and others in the end become friends for life. I mean that type of thing is great. When you're saying about bringing it together as a team, it's interesting I did an individual sport. I mean when I was on the ice, from the outside it 8

9 looks like I'm doing it all by myself. It's absolutely wrong. Even when I'm on the ice I'm not alone. I have my coach, a team leader, I have the spectators, I have my family, I have my teammates. Even in Norway, the second place was a Norwegian both from the five and ten thousand. We were all the best supporters of each other and to bring it together to win we can only do it together with other people. It's absolutely impossible not to do it otherwise. You can't just do it alone. Nice. Your story, several of the things that you mentioned about your grandmother encouraging you to dream and believing in you and focusing on the good that you're doing and I mean there are so many life lessons here the focus, the commitment, the dedication, the training. These are just wonderful attributes that you can imagine being applied in many different ways of life. Now you showed after the Olympics to donate a large portion of your winnings to the Olympic Aid and then later just start Right To Play. Can you tell us a little bit about that process? Clearly, when you were 11 years old, you were dreaming helping children in Africa. Can you tell us about how you went from four- time Olympic gold medalist to this next phase of your life? Well, I mean it's, yeah, it sounds like it's planned but it might not be in that planned. As I was preparing for the Olympics, I also started my medical training at the University of Oslo and I was fortunate from my perspective for then being very adjustable to say the least. When I was travelling during the winter, I can come in the summer and do my courses when I was training in Oslo. [0:25:01] But I have this amazing opportunity six months prior to the Lillehammer Olympics where I was off to be an ambassador for this humanitarian initiative called Olympic Aid and I went to Eritrea which is a country in Africa north of Ethiopia. They had 30 years of civil war. It just became independent in '93 in May when I came there in September. I brought my bike and my training shoes and all of those things because I have to stay a week visiting program which they wanted to support and I was particularly with children helping with building schools and a teacher training facility. I could go out and meet these kids and it was a life- changing experience and probably more as a confirmation of what I 9

10 wanted to do. There was that coincidence that I was out because I've been supporting international children's charities prior to this in Norway but it's more randomly and just on an occasional basis. But this trip was like it gave me an opening. And one story from there which is just tremendous to me, I was like standing there. And this was in the slums of Asmara which is the capital, which wasn t that much damaged by the war and it certainly had the impact of it. But these kids had nothing. And one boy, he's a 12- year old possibly, he was more popular and I asked him "Why are you so popular?" and there the kids were laughing around me. "Can't you see that?" and I said, "No." And he had long sleeves on this shirt and I was like "Hmm!" And I noticed that nobody else has that and then it's like so I'm like "Okay, well, that makes fashion statement number one in life." But that wasn't reason. He said, "Well, look at me," and he took off the shirt. He rolled the shirt together and the sleeves became a knot and that became a ball and that's how they could play soccer. So he had to be there and they played with his shirt. And I was like "Wow. So have you ever have a ball or have you had a coach or anything like that?" and he said, "Of course not." I mean they were looking at me like I came from another place. And I said, "I promise you to bring some soccer ball to you after the Olympics." And then the next couple of days later, I saw this group of younger kids, girls and boys, standing on the street corner and they could have been more than six, seven years old, maybe eight. I mean they were looking up on poster on the wall and I was wondering "What are you looking at?" And as I walked down and I looked up and I saw that what they were admiring was the marchers. It was the soldier who died in the independent war of Eritrea. And they were clearly big pictures and were clearly that they were with guns and they were martyrs and they all died in the liberation. And you saw this admiration on the children's side. But as I was standing there, a group of bikers just came through and they could have been end of the teenagers and there was a few of them like maybe five or six them. And then the young kids were turning around running and sharing on these bike riders as kids would do everywhere in the world. 10

11 And I asked myself. That was at the moment as an athlete I said "Wow, what type of role model should we bring out for these kids? They can have somebody to look up to like I had, like I had Eric Heiden." If they had any time of hero in the country older than the martyrs, they won't necessarily only become soldiers again and repeat all the mistakes of the past. They might build this into more peace. I saw the importance of sports of developing a child. I saw then how play can interfere and help them be educated, empowered, and engaged. And I like to put them on the positive development path but they don't necessarily need to be Olympians or World Cup soccer players or anything like that. They just want to participate. And that gave me a lot of encouragement as I was in my middle of the heaviest training in my life because around the skating track eight hours a day as I was training, it didn't really give me a meaning and I wanted to have a meaningful life. I wanted to do something more than just skating around the track for myself and feeling that if I'm a good role model and to inspire one child to participate in sport instead of being a soldier, so as a soldier, then I'm making a difference. It motivated me actually to do better and raise my talent, not waste my talent which I have been given to be skating fast. [0:30:02] And of course after I won my first gold medal, the one I described in the 5000, I had the opportunity to skate two more races. I got into the 1500 meters knowing I was not the favorite because this wasn't my favorite. I was in more long- distance races. I said, "If I win this race in my mind, I'm going to donate all my money I get from this race to the Olympic Games and to the kids in Eritrea. And I want to challenge every Norwegian to give Ten kroners is equivalent to one and half dollar for every gold medal we win in the Olympics. And I remember entering into the stadium again feeling the electricity of the 15,000 Norwegians cheering me on, hoping that I could win my second gold of the games. I was thinking of the kids in Africa, in Eritrea where I wanted to help. And I raced for them and when I won I went to the press conference. I said, "I want to donate my money because they inspired me so much in the toughest time of my training to do my best and not waste my talent. And I want to help them so they can have a chance." And I challenged the 11

12 Norwegian people to give ten kroners. And we raised $18 million in the next ten days from that challenge at the time of the Olympics. And we built several, I mean hundreds of schools in Eritrea. We always built in Afghanistan, in Lebanon. We worked in Guatemala and all the places we've gotten funding we came out of the Olympic game program. So it was interesting to me not expecting that whatsoever. But the incredible power to harness, power of the sport can have of people, how we can bring people together and do good, and that was the classic example. I did not expect that whatsoever as I went in because it was very personal to me when I gave the money. Beautiful. Johann, I am incredibly moved and inspired here (a) with your humility and (b) just your story and how you're inspired by different people along the way and you channeled that energy you've had incredible opening to come that far exceeded anything you ever expected. And this is a beautiful testament of how sports can be used for creating better people and a better world and a more peaceful world. Yeah, so for me this is not so clear because it was like when I grew up where else would I go than back to the skating rink when I was a child, like who else better to me than my coach. I haven't talked much about any of them. When I was seven and started skating on that track, there was this 19- year old kid who started looking after me and he was my coach in my entire career. So when I was at the Olympics, he was still there as my coach and he helped me become the person I am. And he told me on "It's good to be an athlete but you have to go to school. You have to read. You have to advance in all levels. You have to have multiple aspects." Many coaches don't do that. I felt it was very encouraging. He gave me encouragement to think for myself and not being told what to do. He inspired me to believe who I was and the values you create come from that. When I travel the world after '94, I became a UN Goodwill Ambassador for the UNICEF and I went to refugee camps, orphanages. I travel to numerous countries around the world and everywhere I went I could not see that support given to a child, to give them their childhood back. I found it extremely frustrating that we will not - - and even in our international development we're being there and we will call a project 12

13 successful because we participated in them or we protected them. We weren't giving them their childhood back by playing. They weren't given the place where they can feel safe. We didn't given a coach who could be their mentor and supporter. And I said, "Why don't we do this?" And I still sound that because I still see that government, the United Nations, and others they don't take it seriously. They think play is luxury and I challenge that because play and sport is not luxury whatsoever. I challenged it because it is what we have, why we have created the safe environment in communities which we're growing and what it took me when I grew up in Norway. I mean I would say 50%, 70%, or even 80% of our community connections and group is through sports. I mean that's where you volunteered. That's where you bring your child. That's where you grew up yourself and obviously you have music and you have art and you have also other elements to be engaged. But this is a major part and it has been forgotten in international development. [0:35:12] And that's why over the years, I tried different types of projects in the end of '90s. I tested it out and I was extremely well- received. I felt that we needed to form Right To Play in 2000 as I needed to create a global organization to emphasize the power of sports and play for children. So we're use playing sport or playing games to empower and educate the children living in the more disadvantaged areas of the world who doesn't have it at that place. And we use the training of the coach as a main factor because that person, that individual person, is the one who can make the difference that person on the ground who believes that he can change the direction of one child in his own or her own community. Beautiful. Can you tell us a little bit about Right To Play? Yes, Right To Play we are an international organization and we're using of course the transformative power of play to educate and empower children as I mentioned. And we promote involvement of all children and youth. We believe that the power of play can transform a child's life that's why we're working in the most disadvantaged areas. And we're working now in 18 countries or actually more closer to 20 countries and we have 850,000 children in regular activity every single 13

14 week and they've been facilitated by about 12,000 Olympiad coaches and 6,000 junior leaders who we have trained and follow up and mentored and make sure they are doing. By the end of this year we hope to have one million children in activity in a weekly basis. So every week we have one million kids coming to our program. And you have some of those incredible results. I'll give you an example. We've heard a lot about these life- threatening diseases for children in Africa like malaria and the key element for children is to sleep under a mosquito net. You probably all have heard about "Malaria no more" and "Buy a net," etc. The UNICEF did a national average, a research in Uganda, to find that only 10% of their children in the country in Uganda averagely slept under the mosquito net. I tell you it is very, very hard to sleep under the net. It's complicated and there are many kids in the net and it folds over in all sorts of reasons. In the program we have and we have about 100,000 kids in Uganda alone. We have 84% reporting sleeping under the net every single night and helping their siblings to stay under the net. So that's kind of an example of how the program can teach the child about how they should protect themselves, why they should have the net, and we have tons of what we call "mosquito games." They're playing at the mosquito at the net and all sorts of elements to that that's connected to the games and the lessons we're teaching a child from the games. And we have some other kind of exciting things like in relation to HIV/AIDS sexual transmission. In our program, 92% knows how to prevent it versus less than 50% who is not in our program. You really have 94% of all the kids believing that children living with an HIV/AIDS should attend school versus less than 50% who are not in our program, those types of examples, and over 93% are believing that they should teach at school understanding that you can live with HIV/AIDS while we're way under 50% in the children program with other people. And we have to stop the stigmatization of people living with HIV/AIDS and all the elements to that which are keys. We do a lot on health, hygiene, malaria, AIDS, etc. And the indication I will say there are some incredible results where we have 100% of classrooms showed evidence of collaborative learning environment whereas it's 46% of them like to play in classrooms in our evaluation. And that 95% of classroom use the active learning, the activity and discussions on what to do versus less than 50% 14

15 in all the other classrooms. The child really gets to participate in their own learning. [0:40:13] And I think those are the types of key elements. We have seen tremendous dropout rates disappearing right from that 50% dropout now to 93% people graduating in sixth grade. Nice, nice. I'm looking at your website. You're in over 20- some countries around the world. Can you tell us a little bit more specifically the type of play that you're doing. I know you do soccer in some places and you use other games in others. Can you tell us a little bit more tangibly about the type of play you're using and then how that translates into how these people deal with conflict or become more peaceful? Yeah, I'll give you an example of a game. Okay. So let's call it a game which is lot of the activities we're doing. So this is a tag game. You have a child in the middle and then in a circle and then you have some children around that child who has been selected to be in the middle. Then the child in the middle represents the body and the circle around, the children in the circle we can call it the immune system - - and this could be a vaccination game - - and then we have the virus outside. And then virus is another child. And then you tell the child on the outside "Okay, break through the circle of the other children and infect the body." It takes them 20 or 30 seconds and they managed to break through one circle of children. And then we have a conversation about that how easy, whether it was fun, how could you protect yourself and the children were like "Well, we don't know." And I said, "Well, when you get the vaccination, you get an improved immune system and you get two rings children to create a double ring." And then you have the virus outside. And what happened then is that the child managed to break through one ring but they'll get thrown out by the rest of the inner ring or the ring itself and it never managed to infect the body. And we said that's important. And then we have what we call Reflect- Connect- Apply around that. They'll be reflecting over it against. How was it? What did you learn? How do you connect this to the daily life? Do you have like vaccination? Why is 15

16 it important to have vaccination and all these difficulties when virus can infect you. And then you say, "Well, how are you going to apply that?" Well, there is a vaccination campaign at the health clinic. You should go and get your vaccination. You bring your brother and sister to [0:42:41] [Indiscernible] and get it and you need to tell your mom, so that's everything. And then we see them the triple amount of number of kids coming to the vaccination clinics when there are things happening and that's an example of a game. There's always a lesson to the game and there's always a conversation after each of the game. Now, the games are so easy to understand that the kids bring them home and play with other people as well. And then when it comes to sports, we do the same. Only in sports, we had a lot of drills and it could be relay. You can throw the conflict prevention program in soccer. You run with the ball around the cones and you pass the ball over to the person and you say the name. And you have to remember the name of that person and you say "Hi!" and you greet them in your friendly way. And you say, "Why are you greeting people? He could be your opponent and all sorts of stuff." And we go through all these types of things through the different games. And we have created now over 700 of these type of games and activities with lessons aligned to it. And then the community themselves decide what is the problem in that community? What do they want to teach the children and we then facilitate the games as aligned to what they want to achieve. And you do that over a long period of time. It's regular activity so every week they come in and play and they have fun and they learn something new and we repeat again so it fits in them, it becomes natural to them. And particularly this is around, for instance, HIV/AIDS and girls who are going to learn how to say "No" because there's a lot of sexual predators around there who kind of prey on girls particularly young girls who don't know they have the right to say "No" and to run away and do it instantly. So we do that through the games and teaching the child, the girl child, how to protect themselves and they are excellent. They managed to stop any type of sexual abuse or interference with them in that way because 16

17 they've done it so many times through the games. They know the activity they need to do when they get in that situation. Nice, nice, Johann. I'm curious. I see that you're in Azerbaijan, Benin, Pakistan, Palestinian Territories, Peru such a wide range of countries. Do you want that the games are - - that there's much adjustment you have to make from one culture to the other or do you find like 50% of them translate over to a different culture? What's your experience there? [0:45:20] Well, I mean it's amazing like games and play and sports translate everywhere. It works everywhere. The child is no different anywhere in the world. Of course, there are certain methods that need to be tailored to that community and we have fabulous local people like local cultures, local project managers, and country staff who like all going in there and say, "Well, with that methods we can do it a little bit this way because that's better for us and that's the way we like to talk about this." So we adapt them to the local environment. So trust me, you will see the same game everywhere. If you go from China and Peru and [0:46:05] [Indiscernible] or wonderful projects you see in Pakistan which I think one of the elements which has been extremely successful is girls' activation and games for children particularly girls who have not been allowed to participate before being physically active. And of course, they've done it within the cultural context and within the local people and the women themselves advocating for this and make it happen it's become so strong. And I think we have now 130,000 children in Pakistan participating on a weekly basis. All government schools and local community organizations and half of them are girls who have never been allowed in these things before. And I had the chance to visit last year It was just tremendous to see the spirit and the energy and the leadership in these girls. I mean I've never seen anything like it. And I brought with me representatives from the embassies like the Norwegian, American, and the Dutch embassy and they came into these schools and saw these girls active in government schools, how they welcomed us as white people which they normally should be not saying "Hi" to. They were dancing around and they say they've never seen anything like it in the other communities and they say this is transformative change. It's transformative. 17

18 Beautiful, beautiful. As you're describing that, I was thinking of the impact that your grandmother had talking with you as 11- year old now reaching over 800,000 people all around the world. It's just beautiful and it sounds like I mean you've got 15,000 to 20,000 cultures it sounds like around the world working. It sound like that same type of belief in young people is being translated to these projects. It 100% done smoothly. So in that very, very high level of the quality of our training with the culture is the way they are interacting with the children and it's based on the same principle as we talked about. It's finding the best individuals encouraging them, overcoming challenges, conflicts and other elements to their life by encouraging their own abilities to grow their own abilities, and telling them what they're good and that works. Beautiful, beautiful. That's such a theme we've heard through this Summer of Peace it's focusing on what you like to see emerge into the world instead of what's not working. I mean what you heard the people say that "That doesn't work" and "I can't do that" and "These people can't do this." Trust me. The only thing I've heard from a lot of people, even I remember I was pretty good but I came in through the national team and people even said then when I was a child going to the national team, "Don't waste time on him. He is never going to be good." There are always people out there who say, "Nothing is possible," and I say to you that it's not true. It's possible and the proof is here. I mean sometimes it's difficult; sometimes you have to work hard and nothing comes easy and nothing should come easy. The reward is there when you have dedicated your time, life, and effort to it. Tell us what it's like to visit one of your projects and to see these young kids participating in these games. What does that feel like for you? I mean it's unbelievable. I don't know if this is between a feeling of pride and hope and celebration and satisfaction in many ways. It's unbelievable because I have to say that when I'm meeting children who live under conditions we cannot imagine. I remember the phantom, the possibility I build to be living in these conditions. And then you see the smiles, the optimism, the hope, the beliefs they have by just participating in some 18

19 games and seeing what they can do to, showing us celebrating what they have learned. I become extremely optimistic. [0:50:47] Nice. Johann, I just keep imagining that there's a possibility that one of the young kids may actually be an Olympian someday that's in one of these projects. Yeah. And you know what? That's a funny part. That will be unequaled surprise to me as it would be to you because the interesting part for us is, of course, we want them to participate and we want them to set goals. But they're measuring the human condition their ability to learn, their ability to protect themselves from diseases and how they solve conflict. For us, it's more of the basic elements to those problems. That's why they're calling it Sports For Development. If they go on and use that to greater things even becoming a champion or participating in the world championship or things like that, that's just incredible. But I'll tell you a story that I'm hearing from people who've been in our program. I all of a sudden got an from a friend of mine out in Vancouver. And he said like there was a 23- year old kid who came up to him. He was wearing a white plaid t- shirt which he had been volunteering for us. He got it during the Olympics I would imagine when he was volunteering and helping us out. So this kid, a 23- year old, came up and said, "Are you with Right To Play?" and he said, "Well, no, well I've been volunteering for them and helping them and I know the founder" and he said, "You have to tell him how great this is" and he looks at me. And who are you? "Well, I'm doing my Ph.D. here at the University of British Columbia." And he's like "You're doing it?" "Yeah. But I'm a refugee from Burundi and I was in the Burundi refugee camps in Tanzania in 2001 when Right To Play started the program with us. And I managed to get on the scholarship because of my activity first as a child and later as a coach. I became picked up at the school and got my Bachelor and Master in the U.K. and now I can do my Ph.D. studies here in British Columbia and then nothing would have happened." If I [0:53:06] [Indiscernible] nothing would have happened if I wasn't part of that program and he hasn't had that coach believed in him and later becoming a coach himself." Then he asked what is he going to do. He 19

20 said, "I want to come back and I want to continue building on the peace developed in my own country. We need to do much more for the children in my own country." Johann, that is a powerfully moving story. Yeah, I hope we have a million of them by the end of this year. Well, Johann, I'm sure that many of the people who are listening are probably like me just really inspired again by your humility, by your acknowledgement of your grandmother, coaches, and people who have made this possible. And also a lot of people want to know (a) how will I learn more about Right To Play? How do I get involved? Can I volunteer? Can I donate funding? Can I learn more? Can you tell us a little bit about that for our listeners? I mean, yes, everybody please get involved. I mean obviously in today's society they interact this way and we had a great website. You can go on righttoplay.com and in the U.S. you'll have righttoplayusa.org site and we have ways getting out. We also have Facebook pages and you can follow us on Twitter. We need volunteers. We need money and any dollar will go to the program. We like to help more children. As I said, our goal is a million kids this year. In the next five years, we want to double that again. There are fantastic people out there we can support. We guarantee quality in almost everything we do. We uphold transparency and we want just people to have fun. I mean we have university clubs. If you are at the university you can sign up too. Majority in Canada, what we're doing is we're engaging a lot in the schools so people in the schools get involved. And while it's getting well in the community, there's a lot more here which we have done and want to do more of around the world. [0:55:25] Beautiful. And that website is And, Johann, we only have a couple of minutes here. What are some final words you'd like to say to people who are listening around the world. We have people from over a hundred countries registered in the Summer of Peace. What would you like to say? Well, that's incredible. Well, in any of the countries if you have like go on website and see if there is a Right To Play office in your country and if 20

21 there is just contact them and help us out. I mean we just need more people to get in the world. So that's the number one. I mean for all of you out there, I will say if you have a dream, if you want to do something special, just do it. Don't believe that you have to have it perfect. It's never going to be because like me I've done a thousand mistakes but eventually it gets there and it happens and you have a great time in the way and that's the most positive fun thing to do. It's like do what you are passionate about like this has never been a job for me. It's been in my life and what I like doing. And I love it and it's because I'm extremely fortunate to all the people supporting and cheering what I've been dreaming about and there's never been a doubt in my life to be there. And also remember then you have people telling us our dreams. Encourage them. Help them. That would be like my grandmother. I tried to tell myself that every single day it's hard and I make mistakes every single day in that as well. But at least if I can do it one time here and then I will know it's better than if I don't. Beautiful. Johann, I just want to say I am so moved, touched, and inspired by who you are, your story, and what you're doing in the world and the people that you're working with at Right To Play. I just want to thank you so much for being with us here on the Summer of Peace and sharing your life story and inspiration with such power and humility and just beauty. So thank you so much, Johann. Well, thank you for sharing my story with all your listeners out there and again join us on the righttoplay.com. Great, yes. Yes, that's righttoplay.com. So be sure to go to that website and see how you can get involved. And now tomorrow we continue with some friends of Johann and I both from Search for Common Ground which is a conflict transformation organization and they are using the power of sports also to help transform the way people deal with conflict. So we look forward to you being with us tomorrow at the same time for that story. [00:59:03] End of Audio So wherever you are in the world whether it's morning, afternoon, evening or night, may peace be with you. All right. Bye- bye. 21

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