I think it would be fair to say that most of our blogs from projects tend to concentrate on the impact we believe that cricket can have in helping educate and inform about the issues of HIV the important messages around stigma and the CWB mantra of ABC, T.
This is how it should be, anyone who has spent any length of time out in the countries we visit will have witnessed first hand the devastating effects of this disease. It is easy to read the numbers from back home and feel appalled by the shear scale of the problem. However one visit to an orphanage populated by children who have lost their parents to HIV or simply chatting to teachers who deal with the effects on a daily basis gives you a much more gut wrenching feel for this continuing tragedy.
Those blogs however are for another day, today I am going to just talk cricket. More specifically about a cricket game that I have just watched but first we’ll go back a bit.
I arrived in Rwanda a day before the rest of the team, the original plan was to spend a day doing some coach education with our ambassadors but instead there was a trip to the Kicukiro Oval to watch the boys and girls Secondary schools cricket finals.
‘Are you ready to watch all your kids’ was the opening line from Eric our Kigali based ambassador as I met him at the ground. It is now around 2 years that he has been coaching on a daily basis for CWB and he was proudly referring to the Ndera team that was in the final of the girls competition.
Ndera was a school that had not played cricket until 2 years ago when CWB first visited, the interest in sport was evident from those first sessions and Eric has been visiting weekly to continue what we started, they won the final in a very close game against Kagarama another school that CWB has visited many times and a traditional schools powerhouse as they are very close to the ground.
If this wasn’t enough Eric earlier introduced me to Muhawe a girl from Ndera and a rising star in Rwandan Cricket, she was recently selected to represent the national side in the 3 match peace tournament against Uganda. It soon became obvious why as she proceeded to take 6-11 in a MOM finals performance.
She is now one of many who first played cricket in a CWB session to go on to represent Rwanda and it is always a really proud moment when you get to chat to them, so often they recall the day that a team of Muzungus turned up at their school to introduce this strange game.
Yesterday it was the turn of the primary schools to have their finals day, this was a softball tournament with 5 boys teams and 5 girls teams. It was a great day of good cricket played hard but in a friendly spirit, all of the CWB team took turns to umpire and score the matches. Just for the record the winner of both the boys and girl competition – Ndera.
Now to today’s games, since we started the ambassadors program we have always planned to have regional cricket, we are lucky in Rwanda to have two main ambassadors Eric in Kigali and Mary in the southern town of Huye.
Mary has spent the last 6 months identifying talent and introducing hard ball cricket in the south and so after a 6 day training camp the first boys and girls team departed at dawn to travel to Kigali to face an all star team managed by coach Eric.
Sitting watching the game was a joy for me and felt like another massive stride forward for cricket in Rwanda. I would like to claim credit for this but really the true heroes are Josh Mwanja the development officer for the RCA, his impact since joining has been enormous and it is hard to think how any of these tournaments would have taken place without his tireless efforts.
Also clearly all the hard work from Eric and Mary can’t be underestimated, dropping in every six months or so as I do allows me to have a real snap shot of how the game is progressing and there is no doubt that since they started the pace of change has increased dramatically.
Indeed so successful have the ambassadors proved to be the RCA have now invested in 4 new coaches to work along a similar model. The plan now is to expand the regional tournament to include teams from Kinihira, Gahanga, Kayonza and Nyamirambo.
Now that’s a tournament I look forward to watching, I know I promised that this would be all about the cricket but it is worth a mention of the fact that when you ask the students from the cricket playing schools about the ABC, T they consistently get the right answers, another huge credit to our ambassadors.
