8/4/10 Coaches

This week is definitely a bittersweet one where we want to get everything done and live up the last of our wonderful days in Shirati. Melody and I know that we are in for no sleep with all that we want to do between starting the girls soccer team, evaluating in Bwiri, following up in Yakina, giving Babu his bed, playing soccer with the locals, visiting primary schools, and whatever else. We started out the morning by going to Mkoma primary schools and handing out coloring pages and crayons for the kids to color and have a contest with our mosquito net images. Immediately after visiting the schools, we hop in our car to go further away to Bwiri to continue our evaluation surveys. Today was another long and hot day on the field but also slightly disappointing since most of our participants were still at a funeral. After returning from Bwiri, we again played soccer with Junior’s mom but this time we had a bunch of little kids. It was so fun since we were scrimmaging on teams. We played intensely for about 2 hours I think. It was so much fun and such a great workout.

In the evening, we pushed for Killion to get his two potential girls soccer coach friends to meet us at the Royal Price pub to discuss matters over some beer that Melody and I would cover. The four of us met and had quite a productive meeting. The two coaches were already willing to lead this effort and wanted to meet with the headmasters of two primary schools tomorrow. They have a plan to recruit about 50 girls total and form 4 different teams that would play each other in the two local primary schools of Shirati and Mkoma. The only negative aspect to our meeting was the fact that when we tried to reaffirm with Killion that the coaching would be done on a volunteer basis, he asked us to consider paying the coach. Being in Tanzania for 5 weeks, this comes as no surprise to me that someone supposedly doing something nice is expecting to get paid and our translator Killion is the human resources guy. I could tell that Melody was pretty upset about this. I tried to play off the situation which is a good tactic in Tanzania by telling Killion that we can maybe discuss stipends if they girls soccer team idea even takes off and is successful. Everybody assumes that we are made of money since we are mzungus. After paying for about 6 beers for the coaches and Killion, we hoped that something would come of this meeting.