Football is everywhere, every time and with everyone

~Aleattin Berkan Yüce, Halvorsminde Efterskole og Fri Fagskole

About Me

My name is Berkan, and I volunteer at Halvorsminde Efterskole og Fri Fagskole. I’m a teaching assistant at the school. I join to classes such as football, e-sport, and handwork. At the same time, I’m part of regular and irregular school activities. These can be the night shift, midday shift, preparing food, evening activities, traveling, etc. 

I’m very close to students. We have friend-friend relations instead of student-teacher. This is also a part of Efterskole mind. I give different perspectives, show different lifestyles to students.

Football is everywhere, every time, and with everyone

We are a boarding school. That’s why all students live at the school. Me too. And after the dinner, we don’t have anything. Sometimes students get bored. Me too. 

Some teachers have night shifts on weekdays and generally, we do activities after dinner. And I decided to play football with the students. We did it once, twice, and so on. After a while, I decided to make something different. I wanted to play different football games. And the solidarity project has been started.

My colleague who is a football teacher helped me so much during all year.

With my solidarity project, I want to show there is no limit to doing something when people are together. 

For everywhere part, we play football outside, on the beach, in the gym. We want to play football and the place doesn’t matter. In this way, students cross some limitations and they can see if they want to do something, they can find a way.

I realized after I came to Denmark that the sun goes down very early. In our first months, we were playing football outside. And sometimes other students were using the gym. So we couldn’t play for once. But we found a solution. We painted the ball with a phosphorescent color, and we started to play even in darkness. So, the time is not a limit anymore. If we want to do something, we can create a solution.

We have a few immigrant family children in our school. They are students. Sometimes (not always), they feel alone in school. But with football, everyone connects each other. And everyone sees even though they don’t have communication with each other, they can do something together. Because they have common values.

At once we went to another city and we played against an amateur village team. And we saw there is no limit to whatever other team is.

This project is important because of I want to contribute to their open-mindedness, use of their youth energies, respect for each other, and strengthen their sense of togetherness.

I can extend every topic like playing with people from outside of school, with teachers, and so on. I just wanted to explain the heading of my solidarity project. 

And I want to add some photos from our football days…

Thank you.