By: Khosi Pheko
MASERU
To raise awareness about breast cancer, the Lesotho Netball Association (LNA) will host a two–day tournament that will start on Saturday and end on Sunday at the National University of Lesotho (NUL) netball grounds.
The month of October is marked universally as Breast Cancer Awareness Month (BCAM) with October 13th as the actual day to commemorate the initiative. This vibrant and positive campaign seeks to raise awareness about breast cancer, encouraging early detection, and fundraising for breast cancer research and support services. The campaign also seeks to support people diagnosed with breast cancer, including metastatic breast cancer, and to stress the importance of regular screening at the age of 40 and older.
In an interview with the Informative newspaper on Monday, Media Officer of LNA, Telang Machela explained that this tournament will be one of the pre-season completions scheduled before the new season starts next year. He said essentially, this is part of the association’s social responsibility to host these tournaments for such campaigns and to amplify their purpose.
“We realized that we have not been active for a while because our league has not yet started, so we want to have had some form of engagement by the time our league begins.” LNA then decided to commemorate events and awareness, such as African Women’s Month, World Aids Day, child abuse, and many more. “We decided that it would be imperative to have such games, especially for events that are so important; to educate players and the people in general,” he said.
He also stated that, as women are mostly the ones who are suffering the devastating pain of this illness, they opted to use the sport code since a lot of women are inclined to the sport so it would be easy to assemble them and have expertise in this regard to educate them about the disease. He said not only experts will be present but also the survivors and patients for an effective purpose.
“This disease afflicts mostly women, so we decided to use netball which is mostly enjoyed by women, to gather them as they receive lessons from experts regarding the disease. Survivors of this disease will tell their tale of how they survived hence the tournament is called, Lesotho Care and Breast Cancer Netball Awareness,” he said.
For this inaugural tourney, Mochela could not disclose the total of teams that will be participating. Some teams are still registering and the exact figure with the team names will be confirmed before the tournament. But the expectation is that teams competing at Lesotho National Netball League (LNNL) under the auspices of LNA such as the Lesotho Mounted Police Service (LMPS) team, Rovers, Ntaote Roses, City Eagles and many more will likely be the teams to participate in this pre-season tournament.