Baseball

On Tuesday, Rwanda celebrated Heroes Day. (I'll write about it in a later post.) School was out, but teachers still had to come and work on accreditation materials and curriculum guides. Not fun!

The next day, all my students were eager to share how they spent their holiday. We usually spend a few minutes on Monday sharing about our weekend, so I decided to let them share about how they spent Heroes Day. There were a few "normal" responses. Naomi went to the stadium to hear the President's speech with her parents. (Her mom was the first living hero in Rwanda!) Some kids played football, others went swimming, some helped their parents around the house.

Thn came Jonathan's turn to share. Jonathan and Siem were playing at his house, when they decided to try and play that "white person game that they play in America." You know Miss Griggs, that white man game where they hit that ball with that stick thing. Oh! You boys mean baseball, I remarked. Yeah, baseball! :)

But of course they had no bases and no baseballs. Baseball is a foreign game here. Everyone eats, drinks, and bleeds "football"...and not the kind being played today in Superbowl XLV. They've both seen this "white man's game" on TV before, and tried to emulate it with resources they found at home. So what do they play with?

Jonathan said they thought that guavas were about as big as that white ball they've seen on TV, so they ran up and shook the guava tree, (and almost fell out of it), and shook a ton of guavas on the ground.

Then he went inside and grabbed his vuvuleza. If you don't know what a vuvuleza is...let me tell you. It's a plastic horn, about 2 ft. long, and it produces an extremely loud, deafening montone noise, when blown correctly. It can even cause hearing loss. They became famous during the World Cup this year in South Africa, and Jonathan's dad is from there, and brought him one. So the boys grabbed the vuvuleza and tried to play "the white man's game", using the vuvuleza to hit the guavas that Siem pitched, and they ran around the guava trees. :-)

They said they had a blast, and I was just laughing, trying to picture them in my head. Then, after they practiced batting for a bit, they smooshed all the little guavas inside the vuvuleza, and threw them like pellets at each other. I'm imagining paint-ball, African style. :) Love it!