You’ve heard the news about Romelu Lukaku? The 18-year-old Belgian-Congolese striker signed a contract with his dream team Chelsea over the weekend. Lukaku’s star rose fast since debuting for the national team in 2010. Football aficionados aren’t surprised by the move. And Lukaku? He knew it all along. The above fragment* is taken from a series (‘The School of Lukaku’) that was aired on Belgian national tv last year. The series followed a class of youth living and studying in Brussels, doing a good job at showing the Belgian audience a part of the city most prefer to avoid — and a reality they choose to ignore. The video shows Lukaku visiting Chelsea’s stadium on a school trip. No doubt he will make it at Stamford Bridge, or so the fans say.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7JAF77w1c

* Gotta love the use of Elbow’s Lippy Kids.

Further Reading

Goodbye, Piassa

The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.