A great day today, after the ‘experience’ of yesterday, today was a thrill as we saw some real improvement. Rich, Tim &myself went to a local school to train a group of 20 teachers some basic cricket skills and the structure of how to deliver a session to children.
Their organisation isn’t as structured as we do it in the UK so it’s a case of constantly trying to support them and remind them of the effective way to deliver a skill, however their natural ability is quite astounding. Most of them had never played cricket before, a good number had never even seen it played, and yet after 3 hours they were having a complete game between themselves. My personal highlight of the trip so far was seeing one teacher bowl a beautiful away-swinging delivery on off-stump, the batsman play a beautiful lofted straight drive and a fielder diving to try and take the catch. Quite staggering, if they had the same resources here that we have in England I am sure Kenya would be a major world force.
We had a couple more schools in the afternoon, the first went well and the second was fantastic. We were due to be there from 4-5pm but arrived late and by the time the children were organised there wasn’t enough time for games. Instead we decided to just deliver our ABC messages to the whole school (about 500?!) During this we had the pleasure of listening to one girl belt out the most beautifully powerful song for us, with everybody else as the backing singers. Another amazing indication of the talent out here, we’ll try to get a video on YouTube soon. You’ll have some great photos of this as from out of nowhere, David appeared on the roof of an old dilapidated building at the back…that man and his sense of adventure constantly astounds us!
At this point, huge credit to Nish who convinced all of us and the teachers to go over the road in to a tiny bit of grass to play some games with “60” of them. Of we went and had a great time, each coach with about 20 kids (60 my arse!) and they were so well behaved we did some really good games. A couple of local street-children came by to see what was going on so Rich, our floater/helper for the session took them off to entertain them. A few minutes later and he had about 50 of them entertained in the space of about 4 square meters. Space & resources are so limited here, but with a little creativity you can keep everybody smiling!
