It’s a humid Sunday in Nairobi as the dry season draws to an end, and the dark clouds threaten to spoil the cricket match taking place at Jamhuri High School. The Nakuru-based Pirates Cricket Club are playing a local Nairobi team in a 50 over league, and the CWB team have turned out to support the Nakuru cricketers.
The young men and women of the Pirates, many of them still teenagers and the rest in their 20s, have spent the past week visiting Nakuru schools with the CWB team, helping us coach the children and deliver HIV education. Five of the women play for the Kenyan national team, including current and former Captains, Queentor and Daisy. A couple of the men are also pushing for national team selection.
The majority of the Pirates players who helped us this week started their own cricketing careers with CWB. They have since become coaches themselves, whilst still in the prime of their playing careers, and are giving back to the communities they came from. Together we returned to some of the players’ old schools, hoping to spark the same interest in cricket in the next generation of youngsters, and, most importantly, educate them on HIV and gender equality.
The support provided by the local coaches in Nakuru was invaluable to the CWB team. We coached similar numbers of children as in the first week, but now had at least an extra two pairs of hands per group. Our Kenyan counterparts were able to translate into Swahili, identify technical deficiencies in the youngsters still learning the game, and reinforce the HIV messaging delivered by CWB.
At one secondary school, after telling pupils the importance of getting tested so they could get free HIV medication to keep them healthy, a boy came up to me afterwards and told me the medication was not free. “People would rather die”, he declared, “than pay for medication”. Thankfully, the combined assertiveness of Nick and Daisy corrected this myth, which was shared by a much larger number of students than we initially thought.
The novelty of the CWB team visiting from the UK helps arouse interest in our health messaging, and sometimes enables children to open up about issues they may not want to talk about to their teachers, families, or peers. However, local knowledge and language also play a vital role, with the young Kenyan coaches acting as role models who the students can really relate to, adding power and depth to CWB’s messaging.
Our penultimate day in Nakuru came around all too quickly. Come Thursday evening, four of the national women’s team cricketers were working hard in the back yard of Coach George’s dad’s house, teaching the CWB team how to prepare fresh spinach. As we helped wash and strip the leaves, the players expertly chopped the spinach with knives, the fingertips of their left hands acting as the chopping boards we would rely on back home. Thankfully, no fingers were harmed in the making of this dinner! Meanwhile, the Pirates’ men worked hard stirring the ugali (much tougher than it looks – I tried it!) and the whole team pulled together with George’s dad to put on a feast for us.
As we sat together tucking into our home-cooked food under the cool Kenyan night sky, it struck me how privileged we were to be working alongside these talented young cricketers. A product of their communities and not from wealthy or privileged backgrounds, none of them had lost sight of where they had come from. It was by circumstance and not engineering that there were roughly equal numbers of male and female player-coaches, a living example of CWB’s focus on gender equality during the delivery of our sessions, where so many of this team had first been introduced to the game.
Friday morning dawned and the CWB team enjoyed a welcome lie-in, our school bus having been used to ferry children to and from the cricket festival George had arranged at the upmarket Rift Valley Sports Club. When we arrived at the ground we found all the matches running seamlessly, the Pirates’ team ably umpiring and scoring the children’s games. The CWB team were free to roam the ground, talk to the children and take photographs, as our Kenyan counterparts took on the lion’s share of the work we would normally be doing.
The Secretary-General of the Rift Valley Cricket Club, a charismatic young women called Charity, told how how she had only started playing cricket with CWB because of the “bread and soda” provided at school cricket festivals. It seemed rather fitting that the children at Friday’s festival sat eating their hard-earned lunch of bread and Fanta after a busy morning of cricket, dished out by the very people who were in their position 10 years ago when CWB started.
The Kenyan coaches are the ones able to deliver both cricket and HIV education consistently to local schools. In Nakuru we have seen a team of primary school children on some of the first CWB projects rise up to become coaches in their own right, taking on the responsibility of giving the next generation the same opportunities. If this isn’t a measure of CWB’s success, then I’m not sure what is!
Gabie
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