|
'Daredevil Ultimate Discs in Ethiopia'
'Becca Shim's Story'
I spent 5 years at Brigham Young University completing my undergraduate degree in Youth Leadership with a minor in International Development. From that alone, anyone could conclude that I like kids, I like to play, and I like to play with poor kids. When I found out about my internship with the Engage Now Foundation, I was more than excited to go. I'd been wanting to go to Africa for a long time and I finally had the opportunity to go to what I considered the granddaddy of all African countries, Ethiopia.
I was prepared for a lot of things. I had studied and felt I had a good grasp on development theories, leadership and Ethiopia in a nutshell. I had all the camping equipment you could possibly fit into the 70-lb weight limit. I had water purification tablets. I had a honking first aid kit and I even knew how to use it. I'd gotten every vaccination under the sun. I packed clothes, journals, field guides, and (let's not forget) about 40 discs.
My assignment was to go to Ethiopia for the summer with one other intern, assess some of the programs that were already in operation in some of the villages in the Rift Valley area, research the demography, feel out the possibility of implementing new programs, and execute some sort of personal pet project involving my passion for playing with poor kids.
After the first week, my fellow intern realized that he couldn't spend a whole summer away from his girlfriend and daily showers and packed up and left without much notice. I was left there as a single foreign female to fend for my self (that was a lot of alliteration). I didn't know the language (there were actually several that were relevant). I didn't know my way around. I pretty much didn't know anything. I was able to meet up with some contacts who showed me the ropes as much as I could handle and work went slowly and tediously forward. At least, I'd like to think of it as going forward although many times it felt contrary.
While I was prepared for all the things I thought I would be doing, I wasn't prepared for all that actually happened. Having your plans completely and utterly fall through day after day is enough to give you worms. On top of that I spent the whole summer dirty, throwing up, hamburgerless, alone, threatened, robbed, homeless, grabbed, going to the bathroom in ziplock bags, lost and just in an overall stinky state of affairs. During my last month there, I started to wonder what kind of a difference I'd actually made and just thinking about it made me just slightly depressed and sick to my stomach. Of course that could have been the street food I bought for lunch everyday. I did meet amazing people. I did experience amazing things and I did learn a lot, but from a purely selfish standpoint I wanted to leave Ethiopia feeling that I had left something good behind.
My last week in Ethiopia was the week I planned for my pet project. This was my time. The whole summer, although it had been incredible, had also been miserable in a lot of ways. For this last week I had arranged with the schools of 3 different villages to have youth representatives come to a week-long day camp. I had been in Ethiopia for going on 3 months now and it had been all work, but this was my last week and this was the project I'd been waiting for all summer.
I had met with the village teachers a couple weeks before and told them to select among their pupils an older group of kids that were well-known and well-respected in the schools to represent their classmates. The goal was to get a group of go-getters, teach them some fundamentals in recreation and have them teach their classmates. I chose to use the game of ultimate because, besides being the best game ever, it required little equipment, an open space, could include anyone at any level and was driven by the spirit of the game. The idea was to provide them with the knowledge, skills and means to start a recreation program in their villages in conjunction with the schools. Through ultimate they would be able to learn more about teamwork, cooperation, healthy competition, discipline, practice, leadership, inclusion and the host of other reasons that make playing a good thing. I had played some disc games with the village kids on an ongoing basis during the summer, but this was going to be the icing. This was exciting to me and I was ready to have something work out for a change.
I had been to visit the villages on several occasions during the past month, but it had always been strictly business. I had been to the villages to teach about AIDS. I had been there helping to run a medical tent. I had been interviewing participants in a microfinance program. I had been building latrines and stoves and sitting in on literacy groups. This time was different. I still didn't really speak the language, I still didn't know my way around, but now my audience was a group of over 100 kids and they wanted to play.
Sitting in front of me on the first day was a group of eager teenagers who didn't exactly know what they were getting into, but they knew it was something unusual. Not quite knowing what to expect and wanting to put their best foot forward, they all showed up in their best clothes (all of which came from a humanitarian truck). All the girls had fresh braids in their hair and everyone who had shoes made sure to wear them. We met in a makeshift, outdoor classroom in the village of Qarsa Ilala. Kids from the neighboring villages of Xurgee Gallo and Qarsa Qorke walked several kilometers to be there. When I looked at all of their faces on me and I started my speech with "This is a disc", I felt for a brief moment that I was in over my head.
Ultimate in a rural Ethiopian village definitely had a different flavor than I was used to. For one, our field was an open commons area of the village shared by cows, donkeys, sheep, goats and other grazing animals. Making sure the animals had their grazing time was definitely higher up on the priority list than making sure we had a clear field to play on. If we would've taken the time to put down marker discs for all the holes, dimples and not to mention cow pies on the field, we would've been playing on a solid field of discs.
The handler hucked it to him and it was a beautiful put...or at least it would've been. Ambessa broke away from his defender and ran deep toward the goal line and watched the disc the whole way. Right when the disc was about to land right into Ambessa's hands for a score, he ran straight into a grazing cow! There was fury of flying grass and hooves as Bessy took off with cow-like stealth and Ambessa was left shaking himself off. After much laughter, I think we called it a foul just for kicks. The cow didn't contest.
One of the problems I ran into was the language barrier. My translator was a 70-year old, hard-of-hearing man whom I like to refer to as the Ethiopian Mr. Rogers. He was absolutely the most charming human being on the planet and extremely intelligent, but lines about the rules would constantly get crossed. I think the whole non-contact thing went right over them on multiple occasions. My first tip off on this point was when one of the kids grabbed the disc from his man and then pushed him out of the way so he could make a good throw. Needless to say, we had to go over that rule a couple times, before they really got it. My translator indicated to me that they had a hard time believing that an American sport could not involve pushing everyone out of your way. Point taken.
I was concerned, going into it, that they would have a hard time owning the game. Here I was, coming into their town on their turf and imposing my rules on them. I realized that they would have to feel some sort of ownership over the game or have some way to make it theirs in order for the program to be successful. They didn't let me down. The first thing that stuck out to me was the creativity of their throws. I attributed it to the fact that most of them had never even seen a disc before, let alone thrown one. I showed them some basic throws, but they quickly adopted their own, which in my humble opinion, shouldn't have worked at all. Somehow, they were able to come up with these completely illogical throws that just looked every time like they would end in tragedy (figuratively speaking), but they got where they wanted them and even looked kinda pretty half the time.
Teaching them about Spirit of the Game meant taking every opportunity to teach them about teamwork, leadership, sportsmanship, cooperation, practice, discipline, respect and honesty in play. They seemed to understand the concept on a very different level than I had imagined. We had a tournament at the end of the week. Brackets were set up and the team captains were responsible for reporting their scores to me after each game. After the first couple of games, I noticed that the captains would all have long discussions with each other before reporting their scores. I was curious about the hold up so I went over to a group to see what was going on. As it turned out they were actually bartering for points! Growing up in a culture where everything is negotiated, they were diplomatically bargaining for points to reflect a more accurate score. The winning team was never stripped of their win, but sometimes the losing team was given a few extra grace points to reduce the margin by which the winning team won. There were a couple unfortunate times when the losing team got some points taken away. The captains would just conference after each game, assess the performance of their teams, and come up with a score that they felt accurately reflected the dynamics of the game. My first reaction was to correct this corruption of the game, but after watching them work it all out, I decided that this lesson of negotiating for fairness was more important for them to take away than a lesson of the immutable rules of Ultimate.
After the tournament, we talked about ways they could implement recreation in their schools and already they were excited about challenging neighboring villages and getting programs started. We visited for the rest of the day and talked and played and laughed. It was awesome! At the end of the day, I said good-bye and started walking toward the road to catch a bus back to Addis Ababa, the capital. All I had left was to spend a couple days packing and do some last-minute souvenir shopping. Then I would be on a plane and headed back to clean water, familiar faces and beds that weren't infested with fleas.
All summer, although it had been extremely difficult, there were times when I would stop and take a mental picture of something beautiful. I would say to myself that if there was anything I remembered about Ethiopia, it would be this beautiful thing. Once I laid scrunched up in my damp sleeping bag listening to the rain outside and I thought that this was that beautiful thing. Once in a rain storm in Arsi Negelle, I took shelter under a tree where there were about 5 shoe shining boys. After getting to know each other and even singing some songs together, I gave them each a faranji (foreigner) shoe shine for free. I polished each of their shoes while we continued to sing and laugh. While I brushed and buffed, I thought that this was that beautiful thing. Once I had 10 kids follow me, one holding each of my fingers, while I toured a village. Once I woke up to the sound of monkeys on the tent. Once I took a picture of a beautiful tribal girl dressed in gorgeous ornamentation. Once I sat down and shared a meal with a small family on the streets of Shashamene. All of those times, I thought that they would be that beautiful thing.
As I walked to the bus on the last real day of my internship, I turned around to get one last mental picture. I saw Duressa, one the local boys, dressed in pink satin pajama pants from the back of a truck. He was clasping his hands in triumph over his head. Behind him were hundreds of other villagers waving and saying "Bye-bye, faranji!" It couldn't have been more beautiful had there been music and special camera angles. I waved again and then turned back toward the road happy that that was the last image of my Ethiopian experience that would be recorded in my mind.
Thinking about it on the long ride home made me realize that it had all been beautiful. There wasn't just one moment or even several. It was all beautiful whether I recognized it or not. My goal was to provide the kids with the skills, knowledge and equipment they would need to start their own recreation program using Ultimate as the means. When I left, I realized that they had given me more than I had left behind.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
STORIES
Etheopia
Dominican Republic
Kenya
Uganda
Daredevil Disc-O-Flip Game
Practice your memory skills.
|
Frisbee Throwing Machine
Check it out!
|
Daredevil in Mexico!
Maximum distance!
|
|
|
