Bellingham: Euro 2020 teen sensation with heart of gold
At only 17 years and 349 days, England international Jude Bellingham became the youngest ever player to appear in a European Championship finals and the youngest English player to play in any major tournament.
The Borussia Dortmund midfielder replaced Tottenham Hotspur talisman Harry Kane in the second half of the UEFA Euro 2020 Group D fixture of his side’s first game of the tournament against Croatia on June 13.
He was named in the England manager Gareth Southgate’s final 26-man squad for the tournament after an impressive debut season with Borussia Dortmund.
Bellingham, who completed a £25million transfer to the Bundesliga giants from Birmingham, was selected to represent England ahead of Manchester United’s Jesse Lingard and Southampton’s James Ward-Prowse.
His incredible pace and power while making darting runs against opponents, combined by sleek passing skills and aggressive work rate in ball recovery saw him make a great impact in the Champions League and is now a senior England international.
But it is not just the midfielder’s talent with the ball that’s impressive. Bellingham has a big heart too.
While the teenager’s jaw-dropping prowess in the world’s greatest game at only 17 years has awed many soccer lovers, the star’s name resonates well with young learners of the remote Miche Bora School in the outskirts of the port city of Mombasa.
Through his charity page, the Bundesliga helped raise funds to construct the modern school nestled in Mbungoni area which was built under the UK charity Mustard Seed Project.
Rita Fowler, the Director and Chair of Mustard Seed Project, describes Bellingham as “A lovely guy who is not yet 18-years-old.”
According to Rita, the teenager joined the charity two years ago when he was only 15 and unemployed.
Fact-finding
“His father works with my daughter who is also a trustee of Mustard Seed Project and she discussed the project with him.
When his father spoke to Jude about what we were doing he was eager to help. This was two years ago when Jude was not quite 16 years old.
Of course, at that time he was not earning any money himself but he arranged for us to take out football kits for the school and our football team,” Rita told People Sport, adding the phenomenal midfielder also set up a fundraising page for the charity.
According to Rita, while playing for Birmingham City last year and even though he was only earning a little salary he managed to interest the club in the charity and “they made us their charity of the year.”
“Jude and his family have made a number of generous donations to the charity and he has said that he plans to support us in the long-term.
He now plays for Borussia Dortmund and has recently set up a new fundraising page.
Jude has never been to Kenya but hopes to come sometime in the future,” explains Rita who is also one of the founding trustees of the Mustard seed project.
Rita says the school has 300 disadvantaged children aged between three and 14 years in classes of 25-30.
The school boasts of excellent teachers and impressive academic results.
“The first year that we had children old enough to take their KCPE was 2018 and the mean score in both 2018 and 2019 was B-.
No results in 2020 of course because of the pandemic but in 2021, having spent 8 months at home with no tuition, the students still managed to achieve a mean score of C+,” she reckons.
Rita, a qualified nurse and midwife who later re-trained as a primary school teacher and her husband Geoff Fowler, a civil engineer, came to Kenya on a six-day safari tour to Mombasa in 2008 shortly after Rita’s retirement as a primary school teacher in the UK .
She says when she saw a school in a poor area of Mombasa it evoked the idea to start the school.
“Our taxi driver took us to Mgongeni where we saw a small informal school in two classrooms with no resources and unqualified teachers and we decided we had skills to offer and wanted to help.
It cannot be fair for children to be disadvantaged just because they were born in the wrong place,” she says: “We set up a charity in the UK in February 2009 and then in March 2009, having returned to Kenya on a fact-finding mission we set up the project as a foundation.
In September 2009, we set up our own school, Miche Bora Nursery and Primary School with just 17 nursery children and two teachers in two classrooms of another school.”
According to the UK retiree, they moved premises twice as the school grew by one class per year.
At the end of 2010 they found a building to rent which allowed us to accommodate our growing school population.
And as time progressed the couple realised that the only solution “was to build our own school.”
But then came the hurdle of getting land which she says proved difficult to find in Mgongeni before they eventually found a plot in neighbouring Mbungoni which they bought.
At the end of 2014, she recalls the foundations and four classrooms were up alongside three toilets. The school was then in two locations, the rented building and the first section of our new building.
Since 2009, she says, they have spent two months each year working in Kenya with the teachers and with the youth, women and sport and local higher education establishments.
