The One With The Day At The Races (4/17/2013)

Monday morning I showed up at school ready for a day of classes.  At about 7:45 I found out that there was going to be a meeting at 8 (when classes are supposed to start).  At 7:55 I found out that at the meeting we would be deciding if there would even be classes that day.  And by 8:30 all classes were canceled.  Days never go as I expect here, you would think I would have learned by now.

Evidently the district education officer (DEO) informed our headmaster that Tuesday was to be “sports and games day” at Kafule meaning that we needed to use Monday to prepare the fields.  Tanzania is holding a mini-Olympics for secondary school students.  Each district is putting together a team to compete in soccer, netball, volleyball, track, discus, javelin, and shotput.  Well, Kafule School is on top of a mountain, so making room for all of these fields was a lot of work!! We spent the day on Monday digging out parts of the mountain, moving dirt all around, and trying our best to extend the fields without causing landslides. 

But we got it done and Tuesday the games began.  We had a few other schools from our district come for tryouts and the DEO came to supervise.  Unfortunately it rained for the first half of the day.  But don’t worry, that didn’t stop the festivities, it just meant that the track winners were the ones with the best balance through the mud and not necessarily the fastest runners at the school. In the boys 400 meter race (by the way all of the distance runs were eyeballed for length of the track) 5 boys lined up.  The whistle blew and the boys took off, all except Ibrihimu, one of the form II boys here.  He lightly jogged the start, got the whole school laughing, waited for the 4 boys ahead of him to slip and fall and then took off to win the race.  On to the regional games he goes!

The games went all day and Kafule won every event except shotput.  Unfortunately the national tournament isn’t until June so I won’t be in the country for it, but I am so glad that I got to see the preliminary rounds!