Since then, the MATCH Foundation has been able to build their own school where students can learn through both sports and education, and even receive visits from famous tennis figures like Roger Federer.
Here is a little context on how communities and villages are set up. Each of the villages is considered part of the bigger city, which is Lilongwe. That being said, it would be easier to think of Lilongwe as a county and each of these villages as separate towns. Each village has their own chiefs and ways of going about things. These chiefs are the leaders of these villages and the ones that make the decisions for the community as a whole. For this reason, when Tadala wanted to start the MATCH Foundation, she went to the chief of Mtandile and requested his permission and blessing to recruit families and youth in his village for this tennis/education program. The chief then went to the parents in his village and encouraged them to allow their kids to go and participate. Ever since the organization started back in 2020, it has continued to grow to where it is now.
The community where I coach tennis is on the opposite side of Lilongwe from where I teach secondary school, and thus there are different groups of youth at each location. The name of the village where I coach tennis is called Mtandile, and where I teach school is called Kauma. Both Mtandile and Kauma are among the least developed and most crowded areas in Lilongwe. So you can imagine the challenges that presented when I started coaching last September. While I have informally taught tennis and other similar sports, I had never done it before in a formal setting, so this was new to me.
