Ahh Kisumu. A great place. However, if during this trip
anyone had ventured the opinion that they’d missed the rains of home, then
Kisumu gave everyone a less then gentle reminder. When Toto were ‘blessing the
rain down on Africa’ then they obviously weren’t staying in a tent.
No sir. It rained like a biggedy-bad boy. But only at night. During the days we found time to visit a great project for Tackle Africa. The St Francis Youth Project are a wonderful group of folks doing their job in the toughest of circumstances. The Nyanza province, of which Kisumu is a part, has the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Kenya. 40% of the people have the disease. Half the orphans in Kenya are in this province, their parents lost to the disease.
The job for the project is massive. Thanks to their hard work awareness is higher, more people are being made to confront the disease, more people are taking the test, the sad inevitability of the early attitudes to HIV/AIDS is that more people are failing.
St Francis Youth Project is aiming to stop this. Their aim is to stop the next generation from repeating this pattern. Part of the plan involves football and Tackle Africa specifically. Andy will have talked in greater depth about the work they do. On top of all this they also sorted us out a couple of games of football.
Game 1 was a cracker, 11 a side, and we played really well. Only Howie, Johnson and Barnard ran out for this one. Ably assisted by some local lads, we showed some good stuff. Andy notched his goals (another hat trick) and also set up three more. He even tracked back into his own half, that man will do anything for a SUNSTARMAN rating. Ed provided great support in midfield. He has really taken to the African technique for tackling. This basically involves charging into a challenge face on and then frantically scrapping away for the ball amongst a cluster of legs. It’s a block challenge plus one. As for me, I set up one of Andy’s goals with a quickly taken free kick over the top and, for fans of sweet Brazillian soccer skills, I also busted out another dragback to school another striker. That this was greeted by howls of derision for the unfortunate opposition player, was sadly as much an indictment of his naivety, as it was an expression of how unlikely they all clearly thought it was that I should have that in my locker.
Game 2 was less so. As I’ll write later, this was to be game 4 in a 5 day period and we were leggy. It was also played with us a man down. Happy that these excuses are enough to explain a 6-3 defeat, let’s move on.
The ref was sh*t too.
JJ FootballAfrica, signing out with an especially long goodbye to annoy Andy, who is sitting waiting to put the photos on x
Game1
Line-up: Johnson 8 Barnard 8 Howie 9 SUNSTARMAN
Game2 Line-up: Johnson 6 Barnard 7 SUNSTARMAN Howie 6
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