As a final event to conclude my dad’s summer soccer camp for orphans, he organized a tournament between the two orphanages he worked with. The hosting orphanage has a fantastic property, a large farm with several buildings of classrooms, several dormitories, an art room, a volleyball court, and a soccer field. It houses about 40 orphans. The visiting orphanage has over 80 residents but has significantly smaller space, as well as the prior pictured soccer field, which is definitely not fit for bare feet, much less a ball that always tends to roll downhill.
Dad had an ambitious plan for teams to be made and split the day into time periods which the teams would rotate through to score points for their team by playing games against each other. Translate that into African time and African style, and we had 120 kids with a variety of colored ribbons on their heads running around squealing and having a good time and playing. The day opened with many welcome songs, so many that we started to think we would be watching performances until lunchtime. The performers basically had to be stopped to go play the games they had come to play. Mom was busy cooking banana bread on a sigiri, a small round charcoal stove. This is accomplished by placing the banana bread pan on top of two empty tuna fish cans placed inside a large metal pot, with another large metal pot placed on top to create a Dutch oven. This banana bread came out fantastically, but it took several hours to bake each loaf, so by lunchtime only one loaf for the 150 of us was cut into tiny bites of banana bread for everyone.
I was assigned to the four square station, which wasn’t a real station, it was just a four square court I drew with chalk on an uneven area of concrete and then tried to recruit wayward children. I realized as I looked at it that the squares were warped and 2nd square was far smaller than 4th square. I had to sweep the stones and goat detritus off the court before starting to play with a broom made of twigs. (The orphanage has a goat named Jennifer) After going to all this trouble, I was excited to gather several girls who had been pushed out from the volleyball court, until I realized I was trying to teach a fairly complex game to young children who did not speak my language. It took at least 45 minutes to establish rule #1: the ball can only bounce once in your square. I gave up and led them to the face painting table, where about five kids were getting each cheek, each hand, and their foreheads decorated with butterflies and hearts.
The day was a resounding success, and when it was time for farewells, we got a wonderful sendoff with many “weebales” (“way ba lay”: thank yous). Again we had singing, but this time we had special personalized songs and dances. “Mr. Dick Weebale, Mr. Dick Weebale!” was my favorite. The next best was “Mr. Dick, we are very sorry, that you are leaving, keep on remembering us!…” This was repeated verse by verse for “Maama Linda” and “Mr. Aa-rin” (which must be Brian, but we decided this might be some weird fusion between Alison and Brian since only 3 names were mentioned. We finished with some folk music and dancing, for which I would have loved a translation, since it really appeared to involve a man beating his wife with a stick, and then some children acting like monkeys and dancing in a circle. Overall, one of my happiest days in Uganda this summer. Mr. Dick weebale indeed, weebale nnyo.
No comments:
Post a Comment