Another nice early start today (groan) as we had another significant bus journey to get to the Masaai village. I’m not sure how many kilometres we travelled in 2.5hrs but it can’t have been many, the roads were the worst we’ve seen. I don’t know how you can get pot-holes literally big enough to fit a person in, but they’re all over the place. The bus lurched through one after another, occasionally tempting us with the idea of rolling over, but Linc got us through eventually and we were all glad to stretch our legs at the first school.
This school was so remote it presented some additional challenges for the group that we hadn’t really expected. Firstly the high altitude means we’re all out of breath after just speaking for a little while, and the strong winds kick up all the dust which we duly oblige to swallow most of the time. The children are a strange combination of excited & curious to see us, but wary of us at the same time. Perhaps they haven’t seen white people before and so we played a little cat & mouse game upon arrival seeing how close we could get to one another; very sweet.
Their English isn’t so good out here, presumably it’s just less important, but it makes coaching much harder. I started off with Rich training 18 teachers some cricket skills, which they did reasonably well but without 100% understanding what they were doing or why they were doing it. Perhaps a combination of the above, but we found them to be very quiet, which makes it hard to get an exciting atmosphere going in the group.
While we were doing this, the rest of the group were trying to look after a big group (200+) of Primary aged children in the dust-storm next to us. I was pulled from Rich and asked to take a group of children for a Kwik Cricket game, which turned out to be one of my least enjoyable sessions so far. Tim makes a good point that whenever a session goes badly he can look around to remember where he is and still feel good. As a cricket coach I find that a bit more difficult because I want each session to be a good one, and this was difficult.
I would guess the children understood virtually no English whatsoever, nor the concept of scoring points and not even fully comprehending the idea of having 2 teams competing against one another. As with the poor schools in Kisumu, we saw more aggression in the children as they scrapped for the bat, the only real game for them to see how hard they could hit the ball. I saw 2 particularly aggressive boys have far more goes with the bat than the rest of the group, but it’s very difficult to know what to do in this scenario, as Rich says, it’s survival of the fittest out here and school is another training ground for it.
After the most basic lunch imaginable (wait for the photos) in the village we ran another cricket skills session for some older children at the school. With a little English and discipline on their behalf, the session ran much better with some proper technique being taught and some games played at the end. It shows how much of coaching comes down to organisational skills, if you can’t control the group it makes it very difficult. The day over-ran (again) and we had another very bumpy journey to our penultimate hotel…
…but oh. My. God. You’ll see on another post on this website I asked everybody to write their 3 most memorable moments of the trip so far. I did that yesterday on the long bus journey, if I asked again today there is no doubt that everybody would mention this lodge. Aliya has got us a heavily discounted rate because the owners are involved with community projects including work with the schools, we’re staying in a 5* place overlooking what could be the whole world. Compounded by the pretty poor living standards we’ve had on the trip we are all permanently walking around with a smile on our face.
A regularly temperate shower, outstanding food & drink, a swimming pool over-looking the sunset and a night’s sky so clear as to reveal the Milky Way are highlights to leave us all with a smile on our faces. Last night was about as happy as we’ve been on this project, and will make it very hard to leave.
As I lie here now on Friday morning having just watched sunrise from the comfort of my bed, thoughts turn to the 450 children we’re due to coach at schools today and it doesn’t seem so bad…it’s our last full day of coaching, let’s make it a good’un!
