SOCCER BALLS ACHIEVE HUMANITARIAN GOAL.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

It starts with an e-mail Viva Guerrero of Woodland Hills received last October from an old boyfriend, Brian Dennis, serving in Iraq.

He's a major in the U.S. Marine Corps and had just returned from a Kurdish refugee camp where he saw something he wanted to share with Viva.

Often in this war, Dennis wrote, it's the kids who suffer the most, usually in silence. They get overlooked and ignored, told by their fearful elders to be quiet and stay out of sight for their own good.

Between all the poverty and bloodshed, there isn't much chance for these kids to just be kids, he told Viva.

But he had just returned from a remote Kurdish refugee camp where the kids didn't stay quietly in the background. They had run out to greet the American soldiers, jumping up and down excitedly, glad to see them.

Dennis said he realized there was something missing from their eyes he had seen so often -- something that didn't register until it was gone.

Fear.

"We wanted to give the kids something, but all we had with us were a few Pop-Tarts and our (freeze-dried) MREs -- meals ready to eat," Dennis wrote.

At that moment, he would have traded all that food for a couple of soccer balls, he told Viva. It had been two years since these kids had last kicked one around their dirty, dusty camp.

Could Viva talk to some of her soccer friends in the Valley and send him a few balls for the next time he visited this refugee camp, Dennis asked?

Viva, who played on the 2001 state championship team from the West Valley Soccer Club, the Elites, quickly put out the word to her old soccer coaches and teammates she had played with in the Valley.

Within a few days, 15 new soccer balls were on their way by military transport to the kids in the Kurdish refugee camp.

"When the kids saw them, their faces lit up like a Christmas tree," Dennis e-mailed her back a few weeks later. "Thank you so much."

If a few soccer balls could bring so much joy and good will to the kids in one refugee camp, why couldn't it bring the same joy and good will to kids in other camps, Viva and her friends thought.

A few weeks later, a shipment of another 15 soccer balls was on its way for the kids living in a Kurdish province that had been devastated in the 1980s by chemical strikes ordered by Saddam Hussein.

Dennis delivered them personally to a man who had been the youth soccer coach in the province and was trying to form another team to let the kids play again.

Realizing they were just scratching the surface, Viva and her friends started a nonprofit organization called Balls Without Borders to get as many soccer balls as possible into the hands of kids living in constant poverty and bloodshed.

"We expanded the program to other parts of Iraq, as well as Kenya and Sierra Leone with the help of officials of the United Nations Millennium Project," Viva said Monday.

Last week, 15 more balls were sent to a village in Kenya where the only "ball" kids had to kick around with their bare feet was made of sheets of plastic rolled up and packed tightly into twine.

"We've been getting more requests from other military units for soccer balls so they can extend an olive branch to kids when they visit refugee camps," Viva said.

"So often, the kids get overlooked in the reconstruction process. Something so simple as a soccer ball that we take for granted here can go a long way in making them trust us and become our friends."

dennis.mccarthy(at)dailynews.com, 818-713-3749

HOW TO HELP

If you want to help Balls Without Borders, e-mail Viva Guerrero at [e-mail], or call 818-887-5020.

CAPTION(S):

photo, box

Photo:

Marine Corps Maj. Brian Dennis (center with bald head) and some of his men distribute soccer balls to Kurdish kids in refugee camps in Iraq. The soccer balls were donated by a nonprofit group called Balls Without Borders, started last year by Viva Guerrero of Woodland Hills.

Box:

HOW TO HELP (see text)