The International Football Moms Cup "Russia-Kenya" was held in the Kibera slums in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. Four teams of Kenyan football players and four Russian women took part in it, reports a TASS correspondent who also took part in one of the matches.The organizers from the Kenyan side were Kibera Girls Soccer Academy and the NGO "Path to Russia", and from the Russian side the match was supported by the "Football Moms" and "New Formation". "We have already held such tournaments in China, Kazakhstan and Belarus, and now we have decided to establish connections with Africa. The first point for us was Kenya, namely the slums of Nairobi, where we organized a match with mothers and their daughters who are interested in football. For us, this is a way to make friends with representatives of another nationality and help two countries learn about each other, a kind of football diplomacy," Elvira Lesnichaya, founder of the Football Moms, told TASS. She intends to continue holding such matches in other African countries. According to another participant in the match from Russia, the head of the amateur football team Atalanta from St. Petersburg, Maria Dremova, playing in the African heat and on an unequipped field turned out to be more difficult than she thought. "The African women are used to playing under the scorching sun, with dust flying into their eyes, so they were more confident than we were. But it was an unforgettable experience! My son, who got me interested in football in the first place, also came out on the field," she said.Opportunity for CooperationOne of the organizers of the match was former Olympic track and field athlete Wilfred Bungay, who won his first gold at the Moscow World Championships in 2006. "For me, Russia is associated with special memories, we ran several championships side by side with Russian athlete Yuri Borzakovskiy and finished almost at the same time. I believe that Kenya needs to strengthen sports cooperation with Russia, because it is a great sports power from which we can learn a lot. And the women's football match is also a socially significant event, since for our women and mothers it is an opportunity to escape from the daily routine and do something interesting," he said in an interview with TASS.The match attracted the interest of locals, who gathered around the field to cheer for both their own and the Russian team. According to Faith, a member of the Kenyan mothers' team, they did not learn to play professionally, but football has been a means of leisure since childhood, so even girls in Kibera have some skills in the game. Following the match, the three Kenyan winning teams received memorable prizes - medals with zebras, cups, nesting dolls and wooden spoons painted in Khokhloma style. They also won an invitation to play in Russia in the future, at a real stadium.
