{"id":96,"date":"2015-02-15T06:40:51","date_gmt":"2015-02-15T06:40:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/?p=96"},"modified":"2015-02-16T11:15:22","modified_gmt":"2015-02-16T11:15:22","slug":"5-go-festive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/2015\/02\/15\/5-go-festive\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Go Festive!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Post<\/a> by Thom Manning<\/a>.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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With rain on a biblical scale having washed out most of the programme on Thursday, the fear and forecast was for more of the same on Friday which would of been a disaster for the planned (sort of!) cricket festival. Thankfully though, we awoke to dryness and an early start saw us travel to\u00a0Lyc\u00e9e bilingue Etoug Ebe school for a coaching session with the children prior to the festival, which was also to be played on the same ground and was due to start at 10:00. Now, I think it’s fair to say that this particular corespondent should be well versed by now in realising that agreed plans never run quite as smoothly as you would hope in Africa. However, when you’ve held a meeting the night before with ‘El Presidente’ and had the same details confirmed to you 3 times by ‘Deputy Presidente’, and have also written said plans down to make sure you understand, you think you’ve got it sorted. Nope: 08:00 clearly means 08:50, 60 children obviously means 120 and the festival, it was definitely decided, was to start at 11:00 and not 10:00\u00a0as discussed – oh, and\u00a0of course,\u00a0all based on the assumption that the children were to be granted permission on the day to play! \u00a0Silly me, what was I thinking, when will I ever learn…..I love Africa.<\/p>\n

Anyway, after the usual rushing around and bargaining with the standard fairly apathetic school principle, eventually we ended up with approximately 100 children (to start with!) and began the session. An excellent one it was too with the children throwing themselves around with typical enthusiasm and, with what has become a feature so far on the trip, some brilliant contributions from the school’s teachers who had attended our coach education. Indeed, by the end they were more or less running the drills whilst the CWB coaches assisted them. The team can rightly be very proud of this as it means that the skills we taught at the start of the week have struck a chord. This can only bode well for the continued development of cricket in Yaounde.<\/p>\n

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And so to the festival…. As already mentioned, trying to ascertain numbers and ages of children in advance, when we couldn’t get near to agreeing the correct start time, was never going to happen. However, in addition to the 120 we had already coached in the morning, we soon found that we had further teams from Wisdom & Meveck schools (both had been visited) meaning that, based on the space available to us, we could have 4 games of Kwik cricket being played simultaneously. The actual playing time lasted well over 3 hours, with each team giving a good account of themselves and every game being close, but it was Wisdom, who were a bit older and certainly meaner and tougher (A couple might of found themselves on report with certain UK umpires!) who came out on top in the end. It was a very successful festival \u00a0though, with over 200 children receiving plenty of ABC messages and learning this strange ‘new’ word AWOOGA!!!!! Which was\u00a0reverberating across the field as we left.<\/p>\n

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With an early start, a full coaching session and festival already under our belts, we could have been forgiven for deciding that we had done enough with our day. But that’s not the attitude of this team and so we continued to bully our hosts (poor deputy Presidente) into finding us somewhere else to go. We managed to find an orphanage that would let us visit the children but not until 5pm, so, to soak up some time we descended upon a tranquil park in the centre of town (well it was tranquil until we arrived and ruined various lover’s afternoon…Happy Valentine’s!) and decamped.<\/div>\n
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After an hour or so, refreshed in spirits as well as bonbons, we then headed to our final destination of the day where we were greeted with 30 of the happiest, smiliest children you could ever wish to meet. Songs, games of catch and plenty of ride the donkey games featured, until the light eventually caught up with us and reluctantly we returned to the hotel for the most deserved of beers! We then went back to the park we had visited earlier and were joined by Victor and his wife for an amazing all you can eat (some certainly did!) buffet dinner.<\/div>\n
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What a brilliant day!<\/div>\n
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\u00a0P.S: two of us were interviewed for National Radio during the festival!<\/div>\n
\u00a0So far that makes \u00a02 radio appearances, a written piece in the newspaper, 2 prime time TV appearances with a third to come next week…. Eat your heart out Mr Terrace! Ha, ha!<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\/\/ Post by Thom Manning.     With rain on a biblical scale having washed out most of the programme on Thursday, the fear and forecast was for more of the same on Friday which would of been a disaster for the planned (sort of!) cricket festival. Thankfully though, we awoke to dryness and an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110,"href":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/110"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cwbblogs.com\/cameroon15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}