The futbol game!

Jordan here: Today we finally played ball with the boys of the village. I’ll try to paint a picture of what that’s like. Shirts and skins. They of course split Sarah and I up on different teams and its scandalous enough for Sarah to be showing her knees let alone take her shirt off, so I’m on the skins. Now, a lesser person would have been embarrassed, but not me. I grin and bear the villages first glimpse at a farmer’s tan (which, come on, we know with my hair its more like farmer’s burn). The double-take look I got to be sure if I had actually taken my white shirt off, or if that was my skin was as familiar as it was back in the states. This is not mentioning that all of these guys live to farm and labor is their lives…so they’re all ripped. Now I’ve lost 10-15 pounds already here so I’m looking a bit leaner, but as another Volunteer about to head home after his 2 year service said, I’m as “weak as a kitten.” We start playing and since it hasn’t rained in 9 days and each day reaches between 80 and 90 degrees, the field is dust and covers us all. The darker shade now added to my skin will probably be the closest I come to looking Ghanaian. Being a bit out of practice, my way of saying I suck compared to them, they score on me a few times, but are all good sports about it. My Sisaali is not perfect yet, but I think they were trying to trade me to the other team…anyway… As we play, cows and the cowboys (literal cowboys) mosey on through the field. Maybe you’d think they pause with a ‘game-off’ call. Nope, they play over, around, off the hide of them. I think I even saw a cow get ‘megged (this is when an offense player kicks the ball through the legs of the defense). And of course the whole village is in bounds. One guy booted it to kingdom come and 3 guys went chasing after it. A couple minutes later they showed up again and we all continued. Sarah sat out for a few minutes and got all the kids watching to do the slow clap. Not sure what they thought of it. Maybe tomorrow she’ll try ‘the wave’. One time the ball got caught up a bit in the kids watching sitting to the side and a player came and tried to boot it toward the goal and nearly took a kid’s head off. When the light finally faded and the dust literally started to settle, they all shook my hand and said well done just for the effort of coming out to play. It was a fun time and I think we’ll both go back and play again soon.