Day 10

Early start with everyone on the bus at 7! Malaria tablets “check”
We hit the road to Kakamega, a real rural area an hour from our stop. Also taking us across the equator line *cut to Sorcs doing a sequence of spins on the bus to keep the world turning as it should!

We arrived ready and paired up to start our training drills. It never fails to amuse me how easy it is to teach young people cricket here, but how hard it is to get them to stand in a line!

Every day we try to structure a plan for a certain number but every day we are blessed with more and more children and they just keep turning up! Maz always on hand ready to get the children in a suitable group whilst making sure we all stick to our times! Our team have been incredible on this journey at adapting the coaching to make sure it’s cricket for all and everyone gets to play.

The headteacher of our first school kindly invited us to the office for a chat after our training session! We had a boiled egg some biscuits and a fizzy drink, which we had to take to go as we were on a tight schedule!

Next up our 2nd school today was a quick stop off that was arranged last minute where we set up a few good old game of rapid fire! A popular game that I will be testing out on my ladies team back home.

The children were very little but had the most energy and could really hit the ball far! Ed tried his best to maintain the fielders in a contained area assisted by a support cow but team tiger were keen to get that ball!

Our 3rd school today were very welcoming and we arrived to a small group of children already playing cricket. We all thought we were in for some small group coaching …however you guessed it, this quickly turned into 200 children and the smallest space we have had to work in, again the team were under pressure to find a section of the small space to carry out our drills, Which everyone did fantasticly well!

We pressed on to coach David’s, fathers home, which backed on to the school grounds of our final school. This area for me was really wholesome and felt like a really close community. It was clear to see that cricket was already present and being enjoyed here in kakamega. We were welcomed for the most delightfully hot meal, plenty to go around, even the neighbours joined & teachers from the school! We sat around and were introduced to David’s family & the person in charge of development & security for the area, who welcomed us and blessed the group for all of our hard work and kindness.

Full of lovely food we headed to our finally session which was set to be a quick one with rain scheduled for 4pm……and sure enough as the song suggests it really does rain down in Africa!

Everyone back on the bus, tired but happy in the knowledge that today we made around 1324 children smile, laugh & join in for some great cricket training and life lessons that we leave with them and their coaches here. All in all a successful day for team CWB 🙌