Children & Football

The kids here love to have their photo taken. The best way to make friends on the street is to whip out my digital camera. Kids will come running from all directions and fight to get into the picture. Then, when you flip the camera around to show them the picture you just took, they cheer wildly and I feel like a superhero. The children will often follow me around in the market, begging me to take more pictures of them. Some of them want me to take their individual photo, but that's nearly impossible, since once the camera is aimed they all flock to be a part of the moment. (That's me in the background in the yellow, red, and green jersey).

Football (soccer) is huge here. On almost every street corner I see kids gleefully playing with filthy soccer balls. It breaks my heart when I see them fishing the ball out of the sewer, but I suppose there's really no clean place to play.

Since they play all day, almost every day, even the youngest ones are very talented. My colleague Jared (founder of GAIA at Boston University) and I decided to try to get in on a game of football the other day. Outside our house is a huge dirt field, where hundreds of children play. The best part is that children of all ages play together, from as young as five to as old as fourteen. I donned the Senegal football jersey that Anoop gave me, and we walked out of the gate and into the field. Since neither Jared nor I speak much Bambara or French, we had to resort to hand gestures and motions to signal our intentions to play.

I think they decided we would ruin their game, or that we weren't good enough at football to play with them, so they largely ignored us. Then I remembered Sushil's Indicorps story of how he uses a frisbee to attract children to him and then engage their parents in important discussion. Jared ran inside and grabbed one of those whistling, boomerang frisbees. We threw it out into the field a few times, and within thirty seconds, we had 100 kids chasing the frisbee and fighting over who would have the honor of throwing it back to us.

The kids loved this new toy (which Jared bought for $1 in the US at the dollar store), and we had a blast for about twenty minutes. Then, inevitably, one of the kids busted his hand open during a squabble over who would catch the frisbee. With 100 kids pushing and shoving to see what was going on, we administered basic first aid on the eight-year-old boy, washing and disinfecting his cut and then putting on a huge bandage. I couldn't help but wonder what usually happens when one of the kids gets hurt on the playground, which must happen often. I'm fairly certain that sterile bandages and disinfectants are not widely used or available around here.

We went back to playing, but a few mishaps (frisbee got caught in a tree, frisbee went over a fence) and twenty minutes later, one of the kids decided to steal our frisbee. So he grabbed it, yelled something at us in French, and then ran off into the village. We're still searching for that kid and our orange frisbee.