Field Day: Kandanda

Some of you readers may recall Jonathan’s post from a few weeks back, "Tumaini Is the New Hogwarts". He wrote about how we had divided Tumaini into the “houses” with the names “Tigris”, “Euphrates”, and “Nile”, and would be having sporting competitions divided along the lines of these houses during the remainder of our time here.

Well, on Saturday, we had our first day of competition. We figured we should start out with a game that the kids understand and love. And, as far as I know, outside of the USA and Canada, where kids’ hearts are stolen by basketball, baseball, American football, or hockey, the first love of every child everywhere in the world is football. Not American football, but football as in futbol, or soccer, or, in Kiswahili, kandanda.

Prior to the day of competition, we took each house and divided it into six teams according to age and gender. Each team had between 7 and 10 students. We told each team to select a name for itself, and they came up with some pretty good ones. The three youngest teams dubbed themselves “Lion”, “Lioness”, and “Cheetah”; some other highlights were “Castle”, “Winner”, “Santos Corporation”, “Dark Angels”, “Super Eagle”, “Eleven Tigers” (there were only 9 on that team, but you need 11 for a full football team, so they said they were “trusting God to provide the remaining two”), and my personal favorite, from my own House Euphrates, “Invincible United” (which, unfortunately, turned out to be quite vincible).

Each age group played a round robin, meaning that there needed to be 3 games in each age group, across 6 age groups, for a total of 18 games. This meant that we needed to turn the one football full-size football field at the primary school next door into two half-size fields in order to fit all the games in one day. It also meant that a lot of grass had to be cut… without a lawnmower.

Fortunately, we had Christopher Ewoi (see previous post, "Tumaini Lives, Part 1"), who assured us that he could handle the construction of some new goals out of wood and nails. He oversaw a group of kids who found straight and sturdy tree branches, stripped them smooth with a machete, nailed them together, and planted them in holes in the ground. The goals were really strong, as evidenced by the way they handled some hard crossbar shots! (Unfortunately, it was mostly secondary boys working on the goals, and they built the first field right in the middle of their existing playing field, figuring that they would play on that one and leave the girls to play on a little tiny one off to the side. We had to make them move the goals to correct this, which was very difficult, since we now had football goals up and footballs floating around, and shooting footballs through the football goals proved to be more interesting to most of the kids than doing more work to prepare the field. In the end, for this same reason, we never really got the grass adequately cut on the second field, and it turned out to be a little bit more difficult to play on, but I never heard any complaints about this.) Ewoi brought out bags of sawdust on the morning of competition and marked the sidelines, goal-boxes, etc. We named the fields “Manchester” and “Milan”.

The competition turned out to be a blast! Nearly all the students were out at the fields all day, from 10 am til 6:30 pm. Each house got a different color headband to wear as a uniform (See pictures; Tigris wore green, Euphrates white, and Nile grey.) If students were not playing, they were usually cheering for other teams from their house. There was a lot of celebration and a little sulking. We got a lot of help from many of the older students for things like reffing games, acting as line judges, timing, video-taping, and most importantly, herding the young ones when it was time for them to play. One of my favorite things was watching the girls play, because it was clear that they were enjoying being welcomed as being on equal footing with the boys. Many of the girls teams had a lot of team spirit, doing cheers before their games and requesting team photos afterward.

The day left us very tired, and as if to punctuate it, we were greeted with a power outage just a few minutes after we returned to our apartment and began to prepare dinner. But it was super fun, and we are definitely looking forward to our future sporting days. I’m not sure how we’re going to manage it when we get to a sport that the students have never played, like Ultimate Frisbee, and will not have the advantage of being able to ask the older students to oversee the younger ones, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out somehow.

Here is a link to a photo album with a few shots from the day:

Football Field Day