The driving goal

Jhamtse Gatsal Children's Community Centre lies in the district of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, a very remote region of northeast India. It is a community, a school, and a home for about 90 children ranging from toddlers to teenagers who come from the nearby remote villages of the Tawang district of Arunachal Pradesh. The centre’s driving goal is to provide these children with better lives, helping them to achieve their fullest potential and overcome the adversity that they face.

Tenzin Dondul, Huracan Project Leader at Jhamtse Gatsal Children's Community Centre, has been a Geography and Political Science teacher for the last five years. He also looks after sports and cultural music. Having moved to teaching from the corporate world, he has found a great sense of contentment teaching students and especially those still at school.

Creating social change with football

Tenzin sees football as a catalyst to teach disciple and responsibility. Having started his football training programme in 2018 he has been able to witness first-hand what a big impact it can have on his students.

“Initially the game received most of its interest from the male students, which inspired me to construct a proper training regime which would begin at 5:00 AM with basic football drills and exercises for the boys. The training program was extremely successful and the dedication of the students led to a more formal program being created and established.”

He is now focussing on expanding his programme to empower girls to be future leaders by bringing social changes through football. His aim is to have a longer-term effect in the community where the girls will become proactive leaders and role models for other girls within the community and other parts of the region.

Supporting future champions

With the additional support from the Huracan Foundation Tenzin has been able to start a new formal training progarmme for the primary school children with a Sports Hour every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On Mondays, the boys play football while the girls are coached, on Wednesdays the boys train and girls will play and on Fridays everybody plays football together. As well as the 12 hours of football training a month he will also run a monthly leadership training session and a monthly team building training session to help build leadership skills and improve academic performance. 

Tenzin believes football has the potential to enable change, “Sport has always been an inspiration for social changes. Be it during world war and even now there are so many incidents where sports played a very important role for bringing everybody together. It doesn't discriminate whether you are educated or uneducated, rich or poor, any color of skin and it has also started playing very important role on gender equality.”