Middle school social studies teacher Hoppe helps build relationships, community

By CAROL STUART
Brentwood Home Page
Brentwood Academy middle school teacher and coach Matt Hoppe spent part of his summer vacation and Thanksgiving break in an unusual destination – Iraq.

Hoppe traveled to the war-ravaged nation with a sports organization that offers player camps and coaches’ clinics across the world to mainly closed countries and mostly Middle Eastern areas like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and Egypt.

“Individually they all have stories,” Hoppe said of the kids he met. “They all have stories of loss, and they all have stories of just heartache, things that have happened to them – maybe not them personally but someone they know, just through war, loss or something.

“A lot of it is just heart-breaking. Some of those kids have to travel to get to us, to get to Baghdad and they had to risk a lot to be there. A lot of times if you are associated with Americans, that can be bad news for you.”

But Hoppe, who went to Baghdad in July and to Basra just recently, says the people in Iraq loved the sports experience and welcomed the Americans.

“It’s less than 1 percent of the people over there that don’t like Americans,” the BA social studies teacher said last week after returning from Iraq the previous week. “It’s the vast majority that love us . .. They want Americans, they want westernized people to come, and they can’t get enough of it. … They actually protect you when you’re there. I think we don’t see that on the news – the vast majority of Iraqis are very welcoming, very loving.”

When he participated in basketball and adaptive clinics in both places, Hoppe wasn’t allowed to take photos of anything outside such as soldiers or bombed-out buildings. But there was more freedom to move about in late November when he went to Basra in southern Iraq, where much of the fighting took place in the earlier Irani-Iraq war.

“It was a little bit different setting, security wasn’t as tight, wasn’t as heavily guarded,” Hoppe said. “There weren’t checkpoints everywhere, there weren’t soldiers with Kevlar and Hummers and all that, AK-47s. They weren’t everywhere like they were in Baghdad.”

There also were very few gymnasiums, or halls as they call sports facilities in Iraq, in Baghdad due to the bombing.

“In Baghdad alone I think there’s only two or three gyms total because they’re just trying to rebuild,” Hoppe said. “They were all blown up and bombed when we were coming through, and in the war with Iran they lost a lot of their gymnasiums through that.

“But they are building a huge Olympic complex, which is where we held part of our camps. . . . They’re building different halls for basketball, volleyball, soccer, it’s a pretty impressive thing.”

Hoppe, who previously helped with relief efforts in Indonesia after the tsunami, didn’t want to use the word “mission” for his volunteer work with the sports organization. He preferred not to name the particular group, however.

There were opportunities to share Christian faith and ideals, but that wasn’t the main purpose, Hoppe said.

“We were there to offer a sport service, but through that we were able to build a relationship with them and try to hopefully speak truth in the hope we have in Christ and our belief and our hope that we have in God and the peace that he offers,” he said. “And so sport is a way to build that relationship, to build the trust.”

There were four different camps during the time Hoppe visited Baghdad in the summer. He arrived toward the end of a basketball camp for girls about ages 10-16, with a group of girls coming in from Arbil in the northern part of Iraq.

“In the Middle East and other foreign countries they have club teams kind of like our AAU stuff,” the BA teacher said. “So they had different clubs around northern Iraq. They would offer just a girls kind of day camp for them.”

“. . . We did kind of the same thing in Baghdad for about five or six (boys) club teams there. And after they left, another coach from Mississippi and I did a coaches clinic for different coaches around Baghdad for all different sorts of club teams, girls and boys.”

There was also a volleyball camp going on at Baghdad University and at adaptive camp for kids with disabilities, whether from birth, war or other circumstance.

“There were a lot of kids missing a limb from things that had gone on in Baghdad for the past 10-15 years,” Hoppe said.

A junior national team of boys about 14-16 years old were demonstrators on the floor during the coaches’ clinic, which he said was a fun experience to meet them.

In addition to interactions with the players and coaches during the drills, the Iraqi participants also wanted to take on the coaches on the basketball floor.

“Every day when we’d have a break, the coaches or those players would want to play us, one-on-one, a shooting competition,” Hoppe said. “ ‘Hey, they’re Americans’ – they wanted to play us. Of course being in the heat and then playing all the time, we were pretty tired.”

Basketball ball in Iraq is also behind other countries such as Turkey (national team is ranked No.5 in world) and other places across the globe due the lack of gymnasiums as well as the turmoil caused by years of war.

“It’s simply because for the past 30 years they’ve been fighting, they’ve been at war,” Hoppe said. “They haven’t had a chance to develop all that.

Hoppe said he not only taught basketball, however, but learned as well.

“There was a bit of a language barrier. But we had translators and sport is universal,” he said. “We’re teaching basketball; those guys over there are teaching us too. It was a lot of fun to be able just to see the different ways they do basketball from the way we do it. We were able to give them a lot of good stuff.”

The Iraqi teams play more of a European / international style of basketball, said Hoppe, who helps with both the middle school basketball and football teams at BA.

“In America we really stress and really try, at least with our guys and I think a lot of the people around here do the same thing, we really stress fundamentals, toughness, defense, things like that. They’re more of a kind of finesse, offensive, they play a lot of zone, things like that.

“But they do have a very NBA-ish American flavor in their offense. They run a lot of pick-and-roll, they do a lot of NBA sets because that’s what they see from America. They have good skills.”

There were other uphill battles, too. Hoppe said the heat was unbelievable – it was 120 the day he left Baghdad - and the gyms had no air conditioning which led to another problem.

“In Iraq and Baghdad and all over the Middle East, the sand is fine;  it’s almost like dirt, and that was just everywhere,” Hoppe said. “So when you open the windows all the dirt (comes in) – the floors were really dusty . . .  There’s a lot of slipping and sliding but they figure it out and they make do.”

On his summer trip, the sports service organization was supposed to go to Basra then, but circumstances changed. “Just some things happened and it just wasn’t a good idea to finish it,” Hoppe said. The group then had planned to return in December.

“The consulate in Basra said that’s not a good idea because there’s 60,000 U.S. troops leaving at that time and there’s an Islamic holiday going on right now through the middle of December,” he said.

So Hoppe went back over the Thanksgiving holiday and helped with a girls sports camp and another adaptive camp. Original basketball plans were also changed due to the Iraqi teams competing in the Pan-Asian games.

“Almost all of the girls that participated, that we saw in July and this past time, not all of them but most of them all had the hijabs, head coverings,” Hoppe said. “And that basically depends on their fathers allowing them to come to the camp. If they’re there, they’ve had the blessing of their family.”

Hoppe said culturally that was one reason the group went to Iraq, “to show that women and men can interact, that sport is for everybody, not just girls but also people with disabilities, for kids, everybody. Because in their society, sport was for grown men.”

“So we were able to kind of hopefully give them a model that you’ve got males and females interacting together, respecting each other, encouraging each other. It’s OK for them to communicate, it’s OK for them to encourage each other in a healthy, athletic way. It was really successful.

“The participants loved it, the coaches loved it, the Iraqi federations and the government were so glad we were there. The American Embassy, the consulate, they were great, really encouraging. Everybody was pretty pleased all around.”

As a social studies teacher, Hoppe is able to use the experience to help teach his Brentwood Academy students about the area historically and as a Christian school is able to talk even more openly about the biblical background.

“It’s pretty neat because we do talk about historically a lot of things that happened in that area, with the Mesopotamians, the cradle of civilization. That’s where Babylon was located, Baghdad, that whole area, Iraq, Iran,” he said.

On the way back this time around, he also flew through Jordan and was able to not only to go to the Dead Sea but to swim in it.

“You just kind of take it all in. It’s pretty neat to be in that part of the world,” Hoppe said. “We do talk about those things in my classes.”

After making two trips to Iraq so close together, when asked if he would return he said:

“Immediately? No.  Do I want to go back to Iraq? I imagine next summer I’ll probably go  back and do the same thing. This is the second year they’ve done that. I’ll imagine I’ll go to other countries with the same group or people because they do it all over. They’re trying to get into Saudi Arabi right now, they’re trying to wait for Egypt to die down and Syria the same thing to get into there.”

The trips were paid for through a grant and the sports service arranged through partnerships with the Olympic committee, U.S. Embassy, various sports federations and the Paralympics. The goal was to help build the community through sports.

“That was a huge blessing that we were able to go,” Hoppe said.