I got here, I freaked out a little, I coped, I adapted, I can now experience and inspire.
On Wednesday of this week the team I have come here to coach, AVFAL, lost in the Semi Finals of the Paco Mellville Junior Football Tournament in a heartbreaking 1-0 thriller. We lost to the 3-peat champions Bel-star for the 3rd year in a row (a factoid I learned only after the game).
Now that the team is out of the tournament we gave the kids Thursday-Monday off and that also means that us coaches have those days off. I was told that the coaching program I have been hounding my advisor that I want to run will be starting Monday morning. Thus, my days off have been filled with reading Sport-development materials and putting together a program for my Monday coaching session. My days have also been filled with some exploring and tourism and have had a blast experiencing Limbe!
Yesterday (Thursday), I trained the younger AVFAL kids and tried out some of my coaching program activities which were a huge hit! Then I spent the afternoon walking around Limbe with one of my players, Leonel. A smart, funny and friendly 15 year old kid who wants to work in development economics. We had a great talk about the tournament, his schooling, we tried some local food (fufu adn eru), we also talked about how soccer (or football as I am learning to call it) can be used to teach the team about such characteristics as unity, teamwork, trust, and sportsmanship. It only made me more excited to start my program on Monday!
This morning we were invited to visit the local military base. The BIR (translated to mean the Rapid Intervention Batallion) was having a graduation ceremony and a local AVFAL supporter named Tato invited me to check it out. I was asked to not take pictures so I can not share the visuals with you but it was colourful, rainy, loud, and they fed us. I was then invited back to Tato's place for a celebration on his graduation. He then fed us more tradtional fufu and eru. This afternoon has been spent hiding from the rain and catching up on the internet as Limbe has been riddled with about 18 power outages ranging from 6 hours to 6 minutes over the last 2 days that has made internet access difficult. Tonight will be filled with eating fish (that literally goes from the ocean to the grill with little preparation .. picture to come) and watching some olympics and an ETB (early to bed) in preparation for a training session with the younger kids tomorrow morning. After that, hopefully the weather will permit a trip to a local beach just north of the city where we can enjoy some sun some football and some ocean! Sunday morning I will be getting up very early, about 6, as I was invited last week to join some local men in a pick up game of football. I am very excited to get running around and to have some Limbe men make me feel useless on a football pitch. The afternoon will be spent preparing for my Monday morning program and hopefully out and about spending some time with players and new friends!
It is still amazing how some days I look ahead to me departure date from Douala of October 13 as seemingly years away and others when it seems just around the corner. Come September, when all the kids go back to school, I am trying to come up with ways to fill my time as the AVFAL kids will only be training 2 or 3 days a week after school. Some of my time will be spent climbing Mount Cameroon and hopefully visiting the Waza National Park in the North, but I am also looking to get in touch with local school principles to try and organize an opportunity to work with kids in schools in the area. This should keep me busy!
For now though, it is 5:30 pm here in Limbe and I am just about to sign off the internet here and head back to my apartment to do some work on my program, relax, maybe play catch with the local kids where they refer to me by my given tradtional African name ... "white man". Then chicken and Olympic Athletics!
Cheers to all and much love to everyone!
Josh
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