South Africa’s Fatiema is playing with pride
|Fatiema represented South Africa at the Africa Women’s Cup in Tanzania.
South Africa’s goalkeeper 24-year-old Fatiema Jacobs represented her country for the first time at the Africa Women’s Cup in Arusha, Tanzania.
Speaking about the South African team and her teammates she smiles, “we are always happy - we like dancing and music.”
Football is also something that brings the team together and their collective love for the beautiful game. For Fatiema, the football pitch has become a place to have fun and forget the challenges she’s faced. A lot has changed for Fatiema in the last six months since she’s joined Oasis.
“I am now six months clean - I was addicted to drugs for seven years. For a lot of those seven years I was living on the streets.
“When I was on the streets, I was drugged out of my mind almost every day. I was putting my life in danger because I could have been raped or killed. There was one time when I was on drugs and I became unconscious and people around me lit candles, thinking I’d died, and the candles caught fire and burnt the place down. I nearly got burnt alive. I lived in a really dangerous way.”
Her perilous life started when her father left because her mother was addicted to drugs. However, he didn’t just leave – he also sold the place where they were living leaving Fatiema, her mother, sister and two brothers with nowhere to go.
“My mother, my two brothers and me lived outside. I made friends with other people to try and find somewhere to stay and then I met a boyfriend and fell pregnant. Shortly after I had a miscarriage. After that I started to drink and spending time with the wrong friends and then I moved onto drugs.”
Her relationship quickly became abusive and Fatiema was trapped.
“I had a boyfriend who was a gangster. I couldn’t get out of the relationship, it was only after he was shot and died that I was able to get out. That’s the only reason I could get out.”
After he died, Fatiema was able to seek help with her addiction – her mother had previously been supported by Oasis and after seeing how she’d benefitted, Fatiema reached out for help too.
“I saw her starting to change and look beautiful, I wanted that for myself, I tried to reach out for help, and I wanted my mother to speak on my behalf and say that I needed help, but I didn’t know if they would take me.”
Cliffy Martinus, director of Oasis after she first came along asked her to come back but when she came back she was very high and it was only after a while that she was able to show her commitment to coming off drugs.
Fatiema explains, “you have to be ready to help yourself” before anyone can help you.
She is now living at Oasis and taking part in their programmes. One of which is teaching her skills in welding along with four other women – wearing PPE and using hand tools, cutters, grinders, and electrical tools she’s learning to make gates and frames for windows.
She’s also taking part in an addiction reduction programme called Matrix, which helps people to recognise potential triggers.
“It’s learning how to control that and if I go home, the places, the areas where you get bad people. You almost have to change your circle. When I go home, the places and friends that I used to go to that were triggers – I must stay away from and learn to cope with that.
“I’m still working on myself but if after this welding course I can get a job then I want to give my brothers and sister the life that my father couldn’t give them.”
Anthea Martinus, who works at Oasis says, “We’re very, very proud of her. When she first came to Oasis, she was a completely different person to who you see here today. We’ve seen such a huge, huge change.”
And you can tell Fatiema is proud of herself too, since joining Oasis she has also started to rebuild her relationships with her family.
“I’ve hurt my sister a lot because of the drug abuse. I’m the only one of the children who became addicted to drugs. I now have a good relationship with my sister. Since I’ve been clean, I’ve been able to rebuild my relationship with my sister and my brothers. Because of what I’d done in the past – I stole from them to feed my drug addiction, my sister’s husband didn’t trust me, but it’s starting to change now.”
“Oasis has helped me to reconnect with my family and to love myself and respect myself and love other people. It also taught me about manners – how I need to behave because when I was on drugs my behaviour was different, so it had to change. They guided me and showed me that’s not how to behave.”
And it’s not just her behaviour that’s changed but how she sees herself, smiling, Fatiema says “I’m just proud of myself – that’s all I can say.”
The Africa Women’s Cup took place in Arusha in Tanzania from 29-30th June 2024. Fatiema played for South Africa, which is represented by Oasis.
The tournament is part of a two-year FIFA Foundation funded programme which is bringing together four African Homeless World Cup member countries – Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe – to raise awareness of gender-based violence and develop and implement a new curriculum to help protect vulnerable women.