Africa finds a way

It's Sunday night and I'm sitting at a coffee house in Nairobi. On Wednesday I sat at this exact coffee house. In between is a very long story. I'll try to condense it here for you and maybe throw out a few thoughts about Africa in the process.

My job this week was to coordinate and manage two basketball camps in Western Kenya. As near as we could tell, there is a little underground basketball movement in Kenya that just hasn't received support from the top of society. This is actually very rare for Africa. You never see kids playing pickup games at a park like you do here in Kenya. It's football (soccer) first, second and last. But Kenya's different. First off, they're specially suited for basketball. Because of the gradual migration of tribes from Sudan, there's a lot of height in the area - particularly from the Luo (Barack's tribe), which traces roots back to the Dinka (Manute Bol's tribe). So the boys are naturally tall and very athletic. Second, Kenya has developed enough to have some basketball infrastucture across the country - mostly at high schools sponsored by churches.

So, like I said, we'd heard that kids could play, but didn't know how popular the game could be. We found out in a big way this weekend that we may just be sitting on a gold mine here. Our two camps were very poorly advertised as we had some troubles with Sprite, our sponsor, and couldn't hit the ground until last week. The kids, therefore, had a matter of days to prepare. On Saturday we were in Eldoret where we expected 75 kids to show up. By the time we finished registration, 190 names were on our list - some coming from as far away as 120 miles in a 5 hour bus ride that morning. It was insane. The court was outside the city, but hundreds of people came out just to watch. We found three good, potentially great players - 6' 5", 6' 7", and 6' 8", all under 17. They're raw because of a lack of proper coaching, but they've got incredible potential. In Kisumu the turnout was slightly less - 140 - but that included 15 kids taller than 6' 6", including three guys at 6' 10". I ran a special big man camp just for those guys and felt like I was training a D-1 bball team.

So the camps were a big success and we haven't even hit the two biggest cities in Kenya yet. Yikes.

Ok, but on to the rest of the weekend, which I've decided to break down into special award categories:

Most Efficient Use of Brainpower:

This one goes to me not because I'm especially intelligent, but because I managed to employ every ounce of wit in my system to pull the camps off. As I mentioned, I became the de facto camp director when it became clear that nobody else on our staff had every even been to a camp the size we ended up with. Mind you I've never been to a bball camp in Africa, don't speak the language, were given coaches that spoke English as a second language and had little basketball knowledge themselves, and ended up with almost 200 kids on just two courts. Craziness. All with the pressure of our sponsor, Sprite, expecting a world class camp that would make the whole program look professional. Don't ask me how, but we pulled two camps out of a hat this weekend without many hitches and even managed to teach the kids a thing or two.

This is a great example of what one of my bosses in Malawi used to say to me -"Africa finds a way". Some how, some way, when it looks like all hope is lost, Africa finds a way. He used an example he had heard of some friends that were traveling overland in a Jeep through DR Congo. They came to a river that had no bridge for hundreds of miles through the jungle. All hope appeared lost until after a couple of days the local villages built a makeshift raft from bamboo and floated the Jeep across. That's kind of how the camps felt for me - floating on a makeshift raft that barely makes it across the river.

Best example of the phrase "Africa Finds A Way" (or simply The TIA Award):

This one goes to Africa. Let me explain my Saturday to you. I woke up early in the morning in Eldoret to try to put together a basketball camp for 190 kids and a nosy sponsor. After closing out the camp at 6:00 and hitting the road bound for Kisumu -normally a two hour drive - darkness fell upon us. It's never a great idea to drive at night in Africa because the cars/headlights are so bad. It's especially bad to do so when it's raining, and it's even worse to do so on a dirt/mud road. So as we were going down the muddy road in the dark during a rainstorm for about an hour, we rain into a scene straight out of a movie - a horror movie. An 18-wheel truck had slipped in the mud and ended up across the road making it impossible to pass from either side with two muddy ditches on each side. We couldn't turn around because it was an hour back to the last main road and we'd have to do it in reverse because there's not enough space to u-turn. Luckily there were several other matatus (mini-buses) in the same predicament. And they knew exactly what to do.

Through sheer manpower they lifted the truck out of the ditch and placed it back on the main road. But here's the best part. They moved it only far enough so that the cars couldn't pass on either side without falling into a ditch. Their idea being that if they create a barrier then they can collect money from the cars to help them pass along the side. Our driver got out and negotiated a 500 shilling ($7) fee for the services of the makeshift road crew. We set out alongside the truck and everything was going well until one of the 20 guys holding up our van noticed a mzungu (white person) in the backseat. At which point their boss says that the price jumped to 1000 shillings ($14). I'm actually happy to pay it at this point just to get home since it was 9:00 and we still had two more hours on the road. But our driver, Gregory, drove a had bargain and we ended up only paying 500 shillings and somehow ended up on the other side of the truck. Africa found a way.

TIA

Most Frustrating Travel Moment:

This goes out to the Sunset Hotel in Kisumu. After a full day of running a camp for 190 kids and our 4 hour ordeal on that road at night we got to the hotel at 11:00 at night. At which point the hotel politely informed us that our rooms had been given out. Well, actually it took them an hour to finally confirm that our rooms had been given out and the best they could do was put us in a taxi bound for another hotel on the other side of town. We were never given an explanation of why the rooms were given away, especially since we could clearly see keys for 10 unoccupied rooms behind the front desk. It wasn't until I got back to Nairobi that a theory came to life. The story goes that a month ago 5 British students traveled to Kisumu for a research project, staying at the same hotel we tried to. One of them ended up having Swine Flu, which caused the entire hotel to go under quarantine for 2 weeks thus shutting down their. So one of our friends in Nairobi surmised that when the hotel operators saw a white guy walk in they decided all the other rooms had been booked. What a day.

All in all, though, it was a great trip and I never felt more alive than when I was out working with all those kids or traveling on those backroads through Western Kenya. This is my world. I was actually struggling with all the time I've spent at the office in South Africa and wasn't quite sure how I could handle much more of it...until Africa found a way.

A couple of pics from the camps are at the top. I'll get some more up on Facebook later. Tomorrow I'm gonna try to bring you the inside story of how Hasheem Thabeet was discovered and brought to the United States.