Thursday

Our day got off to a bad start; Lawsy woke up this morning ill with sickness and diarrhoea and was unable to join the rest of the team before leaving for Mitumba. We arrived at Mitumba at about 9:40am and began by a couple of chess games that were played by Dan, James, John and Sean. As for myself I was having fun with the kids in the school yard. After morning tea break, we went into the workshop. When lunchtime came around, we had beef and rice much to Dan’s pleasure. After lunch we were in the school yard and had fun with the frisbee and tennis ball with the kids. Later in the afternoon we went back to the workshop and played a game to learn everyone’s name. Then at around 4pm, we went over to the football pitch for our two football matches against Mitumba Girls and Boys respectively. We won 1-0 against Mitumba Girls with Sean scoring the winner. As for Mitumba Boys, we lost 4-0 with the opposition having 13 players instead of 11. The day ended with going to Mama Judy’s for the fourth night in a row and we had burgers, chicken, spaghetti bolognaise and chips. Overall we enjoyed today.

As for Lawsy, get well soon mate from the rest of the team.

David (AKA ‘Hey Cox’)

Wednesday

Jambo! My daily challenge set by Chris to improve my Swahili has been completed. I even managed a “habari yako” and tomorrow I will move on to “asante sana”. For the record these are “hello”, “how are you?” and “thank you very much”. All in all, it was another blinding day, and I have thoroughly enjoyed myself again! Today was again spent at the CHAMRECC school with the morning consisting of numerous workshops. The much needed break enabled us to go outside and enjoy ourselves in the sun with the kids. The frisbee was out today much to the amusement of all. Coaching in the afternoon was manic. Note for tomorrow – less footballs are better, kids are hard to manage! Coxie led the warm up and introduced Kenya to the hokey cokey. (Please see video link to be posted later). My station was set up with Chris. We concentrated on shooting and dribbling with numerous small skill games going down well with the kids! We strive to meet the level of el dream team aka Coxie and John. Tonight we are talking tactics as we prepare for our first two matches tomorrow!

The days are going too fast.

Sean

Tuesday

Today the weather was much hotter, and the sun was shining brightly! We were up very early in order to get ready and be out to pick Maureen up at 8. However, given heavy traffic we didn’t get there till 8.30. We went straight to Mitumba, unloading all the kit, as Joe wasn’t staying with us today. In the morning, we again took part in the business workshops with the local parents, and also had a small tour of the CHAMRECC school, learning something of its history, finances and importance to the community. In the afternoon, while the workshops continued, Dan and Mumbi sat the class 7 English composition exam with the junior-school children. They hope to get their results tomorrow.

From about 3.45, we made our way back to the field to continue the coaching. It was a longer session than yesterday, and worked out very successfully, despite a short pitch invasion by a herd of cows. Some of the young people said that they had enjoyed today more than yesterday. Again we had 3 stations with the groups rotating between each. There has been good response regarding the outcomes of the coaching sessions.

Coaching at Mitumba

The whole team collecting our 100 footballs from Alive and Kickin

Good to see some of the Premier League big boys following our lead and supporting Alive and Kicking.

Balls to make a difference

We were up early Monday morning to visit the Alive and Kicking football production site. We were shown around by the manager Joel Kinuthia who explained how this not for profit business was started by a teacher from England who was inspired by seeing someone repairing a football at the side of a road. Alive and Kicking have produced around 300000 footballs since starting 6 years ago. The balls are hand stitched by local people using local materials and distribute the balls to local groups working in the community and across the African continent. We saw the whole process of making the balls from cutting the 32 panels to screen printing the logos to stitching the panels together and adding the bladder. The stitching looked really hard work!

We picked up our order of 100 balls which have the logos of both Sunderland Samba FC and Sunderland Methodist Circuit FC as well as health messages regarding HIV/AIDS. We immediately used 20 of the balls to do our first coaching session in Mitumba with 45 enthusiastic children. We also met parents of some of the children and took part in our first community workshop on the theme of business. It was great to see some of the same people we met 2 years ago and we were made to feel very welcome. Mitumba is a slum (or informal settlement) which we have been visiting and supporting since 2004. We will be there every day this week and it will be great to get to know more of the children over this time. The footballs are a real encouragement to them and can really make a difference to their lives giving the opportunity to play and also learn at the same time.