Ivan, Ricky, Joseph, Brighton, Kesha, Jojo, Ciara and Ketra.
Shakira named them one by one. She did not introduce them as a dance group. She introduced them as eight people with names of their own, each with their own story, each with their own place in her Miami home.
The world knows them from the 2026 World Cup stage, dancing in front of millions at the final. Few know what happened afterward, when the cameras were turned off.
Shakira took them to see the sea. Many of them had never seen a beach. That day there was no choreography or lights. There was sand, cold water on their feet, and a Colombian singer walking alongside children who, months earlier, danced barefoot in the streets of Kampala.
It all started with a video. The Ghetto Kids, a dance group from Uganda made up of orphaned children and children from vulnerable communities, recorded a choreography to “Dai Dai”, the song Shakira released with Burna Boy for the World Cup. She saw it. And instead of a simple thank-you, she invited them on her tour, to her stage, to her home.
The children who learned to dance to survive ended up dancing in the most-watched final in history. But the real story was not in the stadium. It was in the days afterward, in Miami, when Shakira had to say goodbye to them.
“It was very hard”, she wrote. She did not say it as a cliché. She said it while crying, according to her own account, because saying goodbye to these children is never easy.
She left more than a farewell message. She left a reflection that few stars dare to share: “Children come into this world through their mothers and fathers, but they are everyone’s responsibility and belong to us all”.
And she added, about what they taught her: “They know how to give and receive love in a way I had never seen before”. Eight children from Uganda taught something to one of the world’s greatest artists. Not the other way around.
Weeks earlier, as the tour came to an end, she had already promised them that they would be friends forever, that perhaps she would welcome them at her home in Madrid. The promise in Miami was the confirmation: this did not end on a stage. It continues in a home, on a beach, in a hug that was hard to let go of.
Shakira gave them a global stage. They gave her back something no stadium can applaud.