[Internet has been, to put it politely, inconsistent the last month or so here in Nampula. I try to have as much ready to go as I can, but it often doesn’t last long enough to post material. Sorry for the sporadic nature of new stuff.]
School was on break this last week for the finish of the first /trimester/third of the year. Its also odd that I refer to it as spring break, because here in the southern hemisphere we’re moving into autumn. And here in Nampula, we’re all but officially out of the rainy season. The sky hasn’t done anything other than spit once or twice in the last three weeks.
So what does spring break look like at the orphanage? Well, this year we decided against going to Cancun because, lets face it, Mexico is basically a gangland and safety was too much of an issue. There were about 6 or 7 kids that went home to family, leaving us a little bit tinier. Three went to their uncles, who happens to run an orphanage even further out of the city than we are, and two others went to Murrupula (village 90km away) because their niece died. Two others just went back to see relatives. Its important for them to keep these connections to family, especially the older kids, because however distant they may be their family is a culturally large part of their life.
For the majority of us that stuck around spring break meant lying around working on our tans and drinking ice-tea through crazy straws. Just kidding. It meant YARD WORK! Since we’ve finished the rainy season there was a lot of grass growing up in places we didn’t want it. Basically, grass means mosquitoes, and mosquitoes mean malaria, q.e.d. grass means malaria. Aside from that, there was a ton of rocks, cement chunks, and nails in corners of the soccer field that has been used as staging areas for construction.
Monday was a long day of working. For everybody. Spirits were kind of down and the girls gave up on the work pretty quick. The boys were getting tired until I told them that the goal of clearing the rocks and grass was to add about 10m to the soccer field. I have never seen people work so hard before. We finished the job just before lunch (a nice 6+hrs of work). Our field is now about 80 meters long.
After a few hours of hydrating, we were ready to christen the new field. Because the weekends are busy with church and the busy school schedule it was the first chance we had to play with everybody in about 3 months. We had a full 12 on 12 game. We started at 3pm sharp and played past dinner (6pm) before collectively collapsing of exhaustion. Yours truly stopped keeping score when he was losing 8-1.
Because of the heat and the sun, the afternoons are kind of a doldrums. Even shops close down. Spring break means non-stop soccer, so the mornings were filled with simple games like keep-away. Tuesday brought another day of anticipation of the afternoon game. Sun down is about 5pm and by 5:30 its dark out this time of year, and once again by 3pm the game was afoot.
Something interesting happens when there are spurts of lots of games. The first is that the same two people always pick the teams. The second is that things get a lot more competitive as the games go on. These are very related concepts. The same people tend to pick the same people and the teams remain mostly the same save for a few players. This makes it easier to remember who is on your team. Also, the team-pickers also move the players around to make slightly more balanced teams. They’re still picking to win, but just not as big. As a result, yours truly won on Tuesday by a mark of 7-3. Again, it was an epic 3 hours of soccer. No breaks. No halftime. No mercy. Okay, maybe a little mercy…
Part Two to spring break coming up soon.
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