Ea Ankergren - trainee in CCPA

From the very beginning of CCPA in 1998, when Anders Levinsen started to use sport in his humanitarian projects, the focus was to use sport as a tool to build up relations. The purpose of these relationships is to create friendships and thereby prevent conflicts. In these projects, fun praxis has been the decisive item. The reason for this is that we think that when people have fun together they are happy. When you are happy, you smile and you laugh, you enjoy yourself, no matter where you come from and which culture you were brought up in. Joy and fun have no cultural boundaries, it is feelings we all have and can relate to. We at CCPA find that joy and fun are bound together, and can’t be separated. We also find that they are the core of doing sport.

 

All over the world people do sports. Every country has its culture of movement and expression. What kind of sports that are popular and how big a role sport plays in the everyday life, is very dependent on the country and the culture of the country. However sport continuous to become more and more visible as at culture phenomenon in our society, both on national and international level. For that reason all people can on some level relate to sport and thereby meet through sport and with sport as a starting point.

One of the possibilities of sport is that sport creates a free space, where the primary focus is on the sportsactivity and in that free space there can be created a forum for the meeting between different communities, who, as in CCPAs case, have been in conflict with each other. Besides that sport gives the opportunity for people to get to know other cultures, through their culture of movement. If one is openminded and wants to know others culture of movement and the way to organize that culture, one can learn more about the persons in the culture than the people themselves can tell.

 

You could wonder why this is? Why is it possible to meet in the world of sport and movement? The reason for this is to be found in the JOY. The joy of moving and the joy of movement. Everyone knows the feeling of joy and can relate to it, even though it can be difficult to describe what joy really is.

The experience of joy comes as a roar of energy and it spreads good humor and gives us an active mind. When you are happy, and joyful you are automatically more open towards your surroundings and you become more creative, innovative, and well functioning among other people. The joy for a thing or a person can become so strongly that it develops into a passion, which is the ultimate expression of joy. When you feel passionate about something you begin to love it with every part of yourself and that is why passion is such a strong feeling. It becomes a driving force that makes a person transcend almost all kinds of barriers. Because the feeling of joy makes such a positive different for people, it is a conditions that everybody strive for to have as a part of their everyday life and that is why people returns to situations where they have experienced joy, to reproduce this experience, and at the same time are willing to let the joy steer the development and chooses in their life.

 

But what kind of elements does joy contain? Joy is a very complex size, which is why it is necessary to look at the simple connections, to find the main reasons for what brings us joy.

 

Lise Kissmeyer has been studying this within the elitist sports and has divided the joy up into four universes of joy: playing, competition, the social aspect and the outer joys as recognition of one’s achievements. Despite that the study have been conducted within the elitist sport, we at CCPA, find that the 4 element are just as valid within sports for the wide majorities.

 

The core of the joy is the playing aspect. The joy of the sport. The part where you are playing with the ball, are using your body, feeling the rhythm, the intensity, the absorption in the detail co-existing with the total attendance in the present. This core, is what CCPA works with.

 

CCPA is especially known for its humanitarian initiative, Open Fun Football Schools (OFFS), that through playing and games, stimulates peaceful solidarity. The main core of OFFS is FUN. All the activities that we do have to have an element of FUN, because it is through playing and feeling joy that people open themselves up to each other. When we play and do sport together, smile and laughter often arise. When people laugh together, it releases a lot of emotions in the involved parties, which creates a feeling of solidarity. Because smile and laughter are similar from culture to culture, it also creates the feeling of solidarity between people across different cultures.

 

Furthermore another important quality of sport is the absorption. Sport gives the possibility to only focus on the activity that you are doing and forgetting everything else, than the activity. Sport is capable of this because it, among other, contains the element of playing, and when you play, you are present. You get absorbed by the enthusiasm for and by the intensity of the game, and in doing so the game becomes the undisturbed focus, which the life is all about. At the same time, while you, for instants, play football, everyone are footballplayers and nothing else. And after the activity you share a common memory together, you had fun and experienced joy together, and makes a bond between you.
This is why, no matter what perspective you put on your work with sports, it is always important to make the activity fun, and create experiences of success, so the activity is pleasurable and the practicing people discovers a joy by the movement.

 

The joy is expressed, as written, through smile and laughter, and when we are having fun together, is creates a feeling of solidarity, and in doing so, human forms relationships with each other. This is why we won’t do OFFS without the joy.