Last night I watched the USA-England World Cup match. If you didn't know it already, the World Cup is not just in South Africa this year - It's in AFRICA. There's a feeling on this continent that soccer has finally come home.
Excuse me, football. Last night I walked down the road to a local secondary school where I had heard the match would be playing. I didn't see any action on the streets. Nobody was around. Finally I found a kid walking by and asked, "Football?" And he said, "Yes. Come." He took my wrist and pulled me around the side of a long classroom building. A generator was whirring inside, and about 300 Rwandans packed inside facing a small, living-room sized TV up against the blackboard. Behind the TV on the blackboard was a big star drawn in chalk, inside it written, "IT REMAINS 40 DAYS!" Apparently a countdown for their vacation.
This week I have been teaching in the same primary school where I spent 2 months last summer. The kids are older, some of them have hit impressive growth spurts, and their collective English skills have improved dramatically. They even remember the words to the songs we learned last year. The first day we had a blast singing "Is This Love?", and then the class got up to perform for me a dance they had practiced for the song. And though these kids occasionally see a white face coming to teach or help with something-or-other, these "visitors", as they call us, rarely return. So, even though I only came back to Shyira for about 10 days, it really meant something to these kids to see a familiar face. And I felt it. I felt twice as famous upon my return as I was after 2 months. But I do suspect that has something to do with the fact that a guitar makes for a much more fun classroom than copying off a blackboard.
Anyway - the world cup. Luckily, all the local kids know me. Standing in the back, craning my neck on tip-toes to see tiny little figures on a tiny little screen (It's like we're really there!), some of my kids found me - Josephu! - and pulled me around to the front. Right up next to the screen. Apparently the Rwandan crowd noticed that they had a special and very visible visitor - and representing one of the night's featured teams! I admit, soon I got into it. The hospitality, the sweaty, electric energy, the screams and butt-numbing benches... I got into it. When USA scored to tie it 1 to 1, I got up and swung my hat around. I might have even started a chant of USA! USA! USA! The guy next to me - he was holding a handheld radio next to his face and we had been grabbing eachother at clutch corner-kick moments - yelled in my ear, "You from USA, Me from England! We are together (Too - geh- thaaa!!)!!"
No, he didn't have his prepositions mixed up. I got what he meant. It struck me that besides me and the few hundred people around me watching the game, and the few thousand in the surrounding areas, and the maybe few hundred thousand in the country, that around the world Billions of people are watching this same human event. This might be the closest thing we have to a universal human experience. Birth, Love, Death, Taxes - and the World Cup. Ahhhh, so THIS is the world cup. This is the world cup in Africa. I got the feeling that I was right smack dab in the ventricle of the heart of an African - no, a human - experience, right there riding the heartbeat.
Sorry, no pictures. I was in the moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment