One of the things we have to do as volunteers with Cricket Without Boundaries is some fundraising. There will be more on that soon, but essentially a lot of the money goes directly to benefiting the children and teachers that we meet out in Kenya.
As many of you will already know, it’s difficult to play cricket with money. Sure, a crisp £50 note might make a good bat and you could probably bowl with a £1 coin, but it’s not going to quite hit the sweet spot we’re looking for. Instead, what we do is very clever, we exchange this money raised for specialist cricket equipment! Ta-da! Bear with me…
Some of the bright sparks amongst you will realise there is another way to do this; get the cricket equipment directly in the first place. With this in mind we’ve all set about trying to source some equipment. A few of us have got some good stuff, but special attention needs to be drawn to Mac’s wonderful work. She got in touch with the International Tennis Foundation who kindly promised us “some tennis balls”.
The ITF is based in South West London and because I live close by, it was agreed that I would go to pick them up – during the middle of a driving lesson I might add! Sure enough, when we arrived there were “some” tennis balls left for us…a massive 1200 of them to be precise!
We tried to fit them in to our little Vauxhall Polo but they just wouldn’t fit, it’s hard to imagine just how much space 1200 balls take up. That’s not the end of it though, the ITF also provided us with 1200 racquet balls!!! These bouncy little blue balls are slightly smaller than a tennis ball and more durable than a tennis ball meaning they’ll be excellent to take out with us…not to mention they were all brand new, still in their packaging!
So I went back the next day (and another driving lesson) to pick up the second half of the balls, just managing to squeeze them in to the car this time around. The next rather significant problem arose pretty quickly, where to store them at my house?! Living in a 1-bed place right next to the Oval is fantastic, but spacious it is not, and 2400 balls take up an awful lot of space. So over the last few weeks we’ve had a mountain of bin-bags in our back patio and cardboard boxes stacked high in corridors and the living room – I have not been particularly popular with my girlfriend I can tell you!
The next issue is how to get them to Kenya! In theory we’ve now got 1 ball to leave with everybody that we meet out there, which is an
absolutely amazing concept. The trouble is, there are just too many balls for me to carry on the London train system to the airport. So 500 racquet balls found their way to Grantham for the recent training weekend to be divided amongst all the volunteers there, and the vast majority of tennis balls have now been picked up by the Ugandan Country Manager Simon Hards. This still leaves me with 500 racquet balls and about 200 tennis balls around the house…any suggestions for how to get them to Kenya?!?