Finally left the office on Monday and got a little dirt on my shoes. We've got a basketball program in one of the townships (slums) in South Africa called Soweto. The program's pretty basic because our funding ran out a couple years ago, but we maintain it with a volunteer staff. Right now we're just in two orphanages. So we take the kids for a few hours each week and see if we can pass on some basketball skills. It was great to get out there and put my coaching hat back on. The kids are middle school-aged and down and aren't that great of athletes. So it's more like a PE class in the States with slightly less structure.

They've been working on skills for the past couple of months and have been begging to play their first scrimmage. So after an hour working on defensive shuffles, dribbling, and shooting, we chose teams and let them run up and down. I coached one team, and my coworker Tsakane took the other. Tsakane played some D-3 basketball in the States and is currently on the South African National Basketball team. Plus his uncle is known as the King of African Soccer so he's pretty well known around Soweto. But in the end my little guys and girls won two out of three games and were jumping around like they had just beat the Lakers for the NBA Championship. I realized that it was the first basketball game they had ever won. I thought that was pretty cool.

Beyond the basketball, it was really enlightening to drive through Soweto with a South African. He showed me the church where all the ANC martyrs were buried, and the spot where the white militants would hide and wait for mourners to come out of the church so that they could pick off the next top leader. It made me think about the fact that a white man had just returned to Soweto, drove by that same church, and worked with some of Soweto's forgotten youths and they never commented about my skin color. Things aren't perfect in South Africa, but they've been worse.


Not much else going on this week, so I thought it'd be fun to give a little quiz about some of the quirks about being an American in a former British colony. How many can you get right?

1) What's the "hash" button?

2) If I'm driving and see a "robot", what am I looking at?

3) If a cop asks me to "pop the boot", what is he asking for?

4) Without looking it up, what's the fahrenheit conversion for 15 degrees Celsius?

5) If I'm about to "knock off", what am I about to do?

6) What does it mean to get "sacked"?

7) What's a "flat battery"?


5-7 right = Congratulations! You're ready to go on holiday at a cold, sloshed, cloudy British beach!

3-5 right = Good, but better brush up with some episodes of Are You Being Served?

1-3 Right = Congratulations, you're now an honorary Texan!!