In the team captain's room, a tiny black and white television is hooked up to a car battery to watch the World Cup. At this stage in the tournament, Annafields Phiri and teammates still put Brazil or Argentina down as favorites to win.
But they are no ordinary team in this impoverished district outside the Zimbabwe capital. All are women infected with the HIV/AIDS virus for whom football is more than a game, it's a life saver.
The Positive Ladies Football Club is home to a side known as the ARV Swallows, and many in the squad would likely have died from AIDS without their passion for football - and their antiretroviral (ARV) medication.
The Swallows have already triumphed in one local women's league, and they've kicked stigma and prejudice way off the field at their home ground at Zinyengere government school about 30 kilometers (20 miles) southeast of Harare, said Ivy Choga, a nurse with Medecins sans Frontieres, or Doctors without Borders, an international medical humanitarian organization created by doctors and journalists in France in 1971.
In this southern African nation where nearly of quarter of the adult population is estimated to be infected with the virus that causes AIDS, the disease was long shunned in local communities. Infected women were banished from families.
``They were hidden away and getting very sick. Families were planning burials,'' said Choga.
In Domboramwari, or Stones of God in the local Shona language - named after the district's bleak landscape of granite rocks - the ``Positive Ladies'' on Saturday were helping a group of their members prepare for a trip they once never dared dream of.
The Swallows are competing in a 5-a-side tournament of HIV positive women in South Africa scheduled July 2 and organized on the sidelines of the World Cup by Doctors Without Borders from its HIV treatment projects in southern Africa.
They will be led by coach Jonas Kapakasa, a former goalkeeper in a Zimbabwe club side.
``Everyone is very excited. We're ready to show what we can do,'' Kapakasa told The Associated Press.
He said he canceled a regular training session Wednesday after a child of one of the Swallows became ill. Teammates rallied around to help get the child to the district hospital.
``It was a real team effort. I'm so proud,'' he said.
AIDS groups have warned that foreign funding for life saving medication is diminishing. The so-called ``Halftime'' tournament in Johannesburg calls on international donors not to cut back on antiretroviral funding at halftime.
``Imagine the referee stopping the match against HIV/AIDS halfway through...Nobody calls it quits at halftime,'' Doctors Without Borders said in a statement.
In this arid Zimbabwe district, with regular power outages and no electricity at all in some parts, unemployment and food shortages are acute. Players in the Swallows grow and sell their own vegetables, some make basic handicrafts and artificial flowers from grass and scrap materials and others receive food handouts from independent charities. They receive their medication from the Dutch branch of Doctors Without Borders.
Phiri formed the team in 2008 after a Harare businessman launched a women's football league to promote his skin and hair care products.
Choga, the nurse, said regular exercise strengthened the women and helped them throw off years of depression, discrimination and isolation. Singing and dancing goes along with their training sessions three times a week.
There have been injuries on the field, but neighborhood skeptics who now turn out to support the Swallows had learnt more about the risks of HIV infection from unprotected sex, often a taboo subject in Zimbabwe - and how the risk from cuts and bruises is minimal, Choga said.
Defender Nyarai Bengina, 33, said being diagnosed HIV positive in 2006 was the saddest time of her life. Seeing her drawn body, wracked by tuberculosis and near death, neighbors had taunted her to take poison to end it once and for all.
Now the beaming, smiling mother of three will soon be enjoying the football in Johannesburg and rooting for Argentina.
``We've got our lives back,'' she said.
