Sports Shenanigans

This past week, some of the students and teachers traveled to a neighboring village to participate in a sports meet. This marked the culmination of the training that has lasted most of this first term. Hopefully this means that, come Monday, I may start to actually teach more than one or two classes a day.

Another exciting thing about the end of the sports meet is that the students are going to be free after school closes and I can start the “health club” that my counterpart Alex and I have been talking about. The idea of the club is to teach the students about health issues, starting with HIV/AIDS then moving on to other things and eventually train a selected group of them as peer and community educators. We’re going to start by getting all the junior high/secondary school as well as some of the older primary school kids to come to the first session and take it from there. More on this to come.

The meet itself was a chaotic good time. The first day consisted of the track and field events. My students did quite well, finishing in the top three in a lot of the events and second overall. The next two days were soccer, volleyball and netball. The boys volleyball finished second in volleyball and first in soccer. The girls were eliminated in the first round in volleyball and were supposed to play for first place in soccer but, because of an alleged ringer on our team, they were disqualified. My actual teacherly duties consisted of occasionally herding groups of students from one place to another. Most of my time was spent walking around and taking pictures.