We arrived at the Golden Palm Breeze hotel on Sunday evening after our lengthy bus journey. We settled into the hotel and had a good night sleep before coaching resumed on Monday. For Leigh Rees and I it was our second experience of coaching in Murang’a as we came here 18 months ago on our first trip with CWB. Since then we had heard promising things about both the standard and amount of cricket that was being played in the area, due to visits from our super ambassador Nicholas Oluoch as well as the teachers we trained first time around.
We arrived at the first school just down the road from the hotel to find some fellow mzungu’s! Lots of them in fact. Two Scandanavian teachers visiting for a week looking to form a link with the school, plus half a dozen Danish trainee teachers visiting the school for a month long placement; all were keen onlookers as we rocked up in our bus and unloaded cricket kit!
True to what we had been told, some of the children had good experience in cricket so we created a game of kwik cricket for some and a mixture of cricket drills for the other 100 or so children. The children’s English was good which made it a lot easier to communicate and explain each activity. It was also clear that ABC’s had been taught to the pupils of the school as they were quick to know the answers when questioned on HIV/AIDS. We departed the session and stopped for lunch in a local market village before heading too Ndeera Primary School for the afternoon session. We found this school a lot more challenging, the students were slightly older but the standard of English was considerably poorer meaning we were heavily reliant on our Kenyan volunteers working with us to explain drills and talk about ABC’s. The children were quite excitable and the large numbers made it one of the tougher sessions, and prompted us to coordinate a different approach to our sessions for the next day. We headed to Blue Post Hotel for dinner, in true Kenyan style the service wasn’t the quickest, but the general consensus was good food and we departed ready for bed looking forward to what would be played on our TV screens in the evening (the hotel decides which channels are played in all guests rooms!). To our disappointment it was a film called Trespass – which I would give a popcorn rating of 32/100, not worth the entrance fee.
Tuesday saw us awoken by El Nino! A massive rainstorm at about 3am which lasted over an hour. We felt that we would be playing the rain card for sure, but in true Kenyan style the area dried out quickly ready for our trip to the first school of the day Makuyu Primary School. The tactic of using simpler drills with the younger children plus having Swahili speakers on each station worked a treat and it was one of the best sessions of the trip so far. We commended the children to a delighted head mistress and she is keen to see us return.
“Trust me girls, you’ll average 49 like me if you do this”
After a break for lunch back at the Golden Palm Breeze where Colette arranged a Kenyan delicacy for some-chip butties!-we headed out to Makuyu Secondary School, which we visited last March. Sadly our bus broke down on the main road and we coasted to a service station where the diagnosis at first wasn’t good. A delay of 30 minutes saw some members of the team indulge in an impromptu game of “one hand, one bounce” on the petrol forecourt and it attracted a decent crowd. Anyway the patient made a speedy recovery (although needs further treatment later in the week) and we set up at the school and enjoyed another good session. It is encouraging to see that some children new to the school this year have a basic grasp of the game already. What was even better was the mature dialogue we were able to have with them about the need to be faithful and use condoms and the repercussions of not doing so (not just HIV/AIDS). The boys knew where they could obtain free condoms from and overall the maturity of the boys was encouraging.
Despite the overnight rain, it was a typically hot day today and over 500 kids were coached, so a weary group returned to the hotel and many promptly tried out the impressive pool at the rear of the site. Others had a well earned nap before dinner!
Two more schools tomorrow-about 6 hours of coaching and, we are warned, MANY kids (which could mean 300 or 600 who knows). Last year in this area we were greeted by 800 in one session so nothing will be a surprise.