Ze Germans Are Coming!

Heather and I both traveled this past weekend, albeit in opposite directions.

Heather headed down to Cotonou to greet the new stagiares, or trainees, who arrived Saturday night, and to hobnob with Embassy staff at the Ambassador’s 4th of July party that was held on July 1. With the arrival of the new trainees, it means that we have now been here for an entire year! We are halfway there. We have not realized how far we have come until we met the new little “baby birds”—what do you mean you don’t know how to ride a zem or eat ignam pilé?—it is both eye-opening and humbling to see how much progress we have made since we arrived in Benin last July. We seem to have adapted nicely so far. Thank you all for your continued love and support.

I headed to Djougou, about 5 hours north, to play in an annual soccer game between German volunteers and American Peace Corps Volunteers dubbed “American Blitzkrieg”. It is a two-day competition, where we play European football on the first day and American football on the second day. The volunteer who hosted us and organized the event wrote up an announcement that was broadcasted on local radio in the area for two weeks prior to the match, and Beninese who live a few hours away knew about the match.

A few PCVs have German Volunteers in their cities/villages. The German Volunteers generally go to university after their volunteer service. They serve as volunteers as a “civilian option” to mandatory military conscription. They work with local Non-Governmental Organizations, just like we do, but they get a lot more money, can purchase and drive their own motorcycles, and are only here for a year rather than for two. And they all speak really good French and English. A few can also speak other languages.

We ended up with 12 volunteers playing, and the Germans unexpectedly showed up with at least 20. We arrived at the stadium in Djougou an hour early, and the stands were already mostly full and the Germans were taking team pictures and warming up. Both teams talked a lot of smack before the game. We made WWII jokes, and they wondered aloud where all the Americans were (the punch line: “Are they in Iraq?” “Ok, how many troops do we still have in your country?”). We had the makings of a classic encounter.

Before the game we lined up and walked out to the center of the field, single file, then faced the crowd and sang our respective national anthems. I lined up in center midfield in a playmaker role, tucked in nicely just behind our two forwards (one of whom, I would find out later, was 3 beers in when he arrived at the field, but he was wearing cleats so it evened out). The field, of course, was dirt, and we more or less estimated the touch and goal lines. The quality of the game was about the same as the field (overall, not so great). The Beninese showed up for a show and we didn’t disappoint, and they laughed at us as we slipped and clumsily mishit plenty of passes and shots. There were a few good give-and-go’s, and there was some quality here and there. We ended up winning 1-0 with a first-half goal, but three or four would have been more reasonable.

After the game we all went out to a bar where a concert was organized. I’m not sure if it was for us or not (there were about 40 of us and we far outnumbered the Beninese at the bar). We had a great time and made some new friends.

This week Heather and I are making the final preparations for our girl’s camp. I am in Cotonou for a meeting (I am our regional representative for the Volunteer Advisory Council, or VAC), and will take the PC shuttle up on Sunday with lots of necessary items for our camp, while Heather is at home working with her supervisor to hammer out the final details.

We have about 2 months to go until our much-needed vacation and 4 months until Brian and Dustin visit us for a few weeks! Can’t wait to see you guys!

Cheers!

Football, Part Deux

It has been far too long since my last football update. I thought that these would be much more frequent.

A few highlights from the past month or so:

•I played for the first time in a long, long time with my neighbor’s team. It was kind of silly how this all came about, since I had been bothering the guy for six months about playing football with his weekend buddies. Heather and I will be running a week-long girls’ camp in June and are soliciting local schools for lists of their girls with the top grades so we can invite them. Our neighbor is the equivalent of a Vice Principal at our local school, and one day he came by to drop off his list of girls for us to formally invite to the camp. While he dropped it off, he started gloating that he would get to play soccer the next day (a Wednesday) because, since it was the day of the presidential inauguration, the president gave all state employees the next day off. Heather suggested that he take me along and, with his back to the wall, caught between a rock and a hard place, he was forced and coerced into inviting me. I woke up early the next morning and went with him to our neighboring city of Abomey and we played for 2 straight hours without a break. I have been busy the past few weeks but apparently everyone asks about me. Can’t wait to get back to post to show off some more Yovo skills.

•After I wowed Gilles and his friends with my skills, he invited me to play in a soccer game at his school. The school was having an end-of-the-semester party and part of the week-long festivities, of course, was a Teacher-Student football match, presumably so the teachers could literally kick the crap out of their students. Long story short, I started the game and scored the opening goal of the game (with a header, no less!) on a brilliant front-post run. The crowd went bezerk. Not bad considering I don't have cleats (I've been wearing my flats and everyone else has real cleats). We tied, 1-1. See the “Photo Mélange” page for pictures of my triumphant debut.

•I have started a girls’ soccer team at said school (CEG 2, in case you were wondering), and it has started off well. Actually, when I went to the school to make the announcement that I wanted to start a girl’s soccer team, I was literally—literally!—laughed out of the school, then of course nobody came to my meeting that I scheduled. Out of nowhere, my neighbor told me that girls had been asking him where I was because they wanted to play (apparently everyone already knows that he’s my neighbor, or that I’m his neighbor—whatever). We had our first practice and I just let them play. We had 9 girls show up and more are on the way when word gets out about it. I am working on getting a soccer ball for each girl (and some for the boy’s team, as well). We will practice on Wednesdays where I will lead a formal training session, and probably Saturdays as well (on their own to mess around).

•My neighbor is quickly becoming one of my best friends at post. We get together to watch all Champion’s League matches. He calls me when the game is about to start to let me know that there is a game on, which is hilarious because 1. I can hear him shouting into his phone from the other side of the wall and 2. We always discuss our “game plans” the afternoon of the game. “Of course I know there’s a game on! I’ll finish my dinner and I will be right over!” Heather gets some peace and quiet out of it, and since Manchester United is in such great form, she doesn’t have to deal with me sulking around when we lose. I just finished watching the first leg of the Man Utd-Schalke match up here in Parakou. We went to a bar to watch the game but the TVs kept going out (weird because the lights stayed on…most of the time). At halftime Heather and I went back to the workstation and just streamed the game live and used the in-house projector to watch the game on the wall. Two-nil and advantage Manchester to take back to the Theatre of Dreams!

Life is good. Football is here and it is plentiful.

Cheers!

Football

Football is as ubiquitous to life in Africa as are music and dance, red dirt and poverty. It is possible to find rudimentary football pitches everywhere, with goals being as simple as two sticks in the ground with a stick “crossbar” along the top. Often, there is no crossbar at all and most of the players play in bare feet on the soft red dirt, and one can find small children everywhere kicking around a ball and emulating their favorite superstar, be it Messi, Ronaldo, or Drogba.
I am convinced that nearly everyone here in Benin owns at least one Chelsea jersey and one jersey for another team, probably Barcelona (I will occasionally see the odd Manchester United jersey, which makes me very proud). The fact that Chelsea has so many African players probably has a lot to do with this, which was a brilliant move because clubs generally receive more value for their money from African players and Africa offers a gigantic, largely untapped market for football teams; Manchester United recently partnered up with Glo Mobile, a Nigerian telecommunications company, to offer live updates and other club-related services to Glo customers, and there are billboards all over the place to advertise the recent partnership. Assuming that someday Africans will escape abject poverty and the corrupt political institutions that allows it to thrive, kudos to football clubs for tapping this market early. I can find decent-quality football jerseys anywhere--on the street, in the marche--for way less money than I would pay in the States or Europe. I have asked around and I have been told that I can get a jersey for around 4.000 CFA, which is about US$8 (at the current exchange rate of ~500CFA to $1). A really cool part about the knock-off jerseys here is that they come in colors that you can’t find anywhere else, such as a purple Chelsea jersey or a yellow Barcelona jersey with red vertical stripes and “Mesi” stenciled across the back.

I have played a few times here and the quality of football that I have encountered is quite good, though it seems to be lacking in organization and tactical knowledge, but then again, I have only played a pair of 4v4 pickup games or watched a few minutes at a time as I waited for a zem after school. On the whole, though, the players seem quick and technically sound, and it is clear that they admire the flair that the Brazilians bring to the game; I can’t help but wonder whether it is the Brazilians who inherit their creative flair from their African ancestors rather than the other way around?
I can’t walk more than a block anywhere without seeing at least a few soccer jerseys, and there are still billboards up advertising the World Cup, which is partly because MTN (the largest telecommunications company in Africa, which was a major World Cup sponsor) probably has not gotten around to taking them down, and partly due to the excitement that still reverberates here for the World Cup or anything football-related in general.
The Beninese national team, Les Ecureuils (The Squirrels), barely missed out on the last World Cup by being edged out of qualifying by Ghana by one point. Right now, they are in the midst of qualifying for the African Cup of Nations 2012 and have drawn Rwanda, Burundi, and Cote d’Ivoire in their qualifying group. This is an historic year because Rwanda has not fielded a team in years and it looks as if Benin has a good chance to advance to the tournament this year. Current volunteers here have said that workdays ended early during this past World Cup and people gathered around little community televisions which were powered by generators to watch games, and the Beninese playfully teased them for the American’s loss to Ghana, which is about 6 hours away (just on the other side of Togo).
To be continued… Cheers