Friday, April 29, 2011

Nadir and Tim Join Juba Airport All-Stars

I ask the driver to take me to the Living Waters Orphanage on the other side of town. There is a tiny pitch there where my ex-pat soccer team meets after work. The orphanage has one of the few partial-grass playing pitches in Juba, though it's very small and mostly dirt and rocks. When we pull through the gate, a hundred \South Sudanese kids are running around, more than I've ever seen there, before. I smell bread baking, and see people milling about near the kitchen - some kind of meal night, maybe?

Though I'm late, I'm the first and only expat to arrive and my driver is uncertain about leaving me there alone. I tell him not to worry, hop out and shake some kids' hands. Some kids are playing soccer; they are very good. A couple of the younger ones (8 or 9 year olds?) played with us last week and were better, barefoot, then some of the adults on my team. Seriously good. Forty years of war but there is still football.

I wait around for 10 minutes after my driver leaves but don't see any of my teammates, nor can I find the guy who runs the place. I sought him out last week to find out about the orphanage. He brought me into his office and sat me down, formally, and told me its history. It has been there for 30 years and started as a home for kids whose parents were killed in the fighting. Now it's a refuge for children whose parents can't or won't take care of them due to alcoholism and/or other probs. The land and buildings are owned by the government but operations are privately funded. "We have some friends," he told me. The place is pretty run down though.

Looks like my guys aren't coming so I start hiking back home when one of my team-mates, Nadir, a Lebanese contractor, pulls up in his silver SUV. Nadir tells me Juba now is like Paris compared to a year ago, when there were just a couple of Kenyan cooking huts and no paved roads in town. Today there are Indian, Ethiopian, Chinese, Kenyan and South Sudanese restaurants, along with a brick-oven pizza place and a number of decent hotels with swiming pools and well-stocked bars. Recently an ice cream shop opened up.

We're driving toward my compound, both a little bummed about none of our guys showing up to play this evening, when we see a group of tall Juba kids in uniform playing on a sloping dirt patch across the street from the airport.

Nadir wants to try to play with them, and I'm up for it, though I can see they are all big young studs, not a player under six feet tall -- and they are very good, playing a fast-paced game of two-touch keepaway, tucked shirts vs. untucked shirts. We find the coach and ask if we can join and presto, we're in the tight grid, about 10v10 now. It's lightening paced, pinball keepaway, backheels and tricks galore but also some inspired one-touch combination passes, Barcelona-style tika-taka. Nadir and I hold our own though it's hard for us to tell who's who because some of the tucked guys have come untucked. We play about 30 minutes at a frenetic pace and when the coach calls time, it seems as if every single one of them wants to shake hands with us. I guess they don't have foreigners pop into practice all that often.

We are the Airport All-Stars, the coach tells us. We play every night. You play with us.

 We'll come tomorrow, we say.

2 comments:

  1. It's funny how soccer really is the international language. Travelling abroad, I've had my French and Spanish fail me on so many occasions. But soccer is the one commonality that never fails, and so much easier to learn than a foreign language.

    No "Juba Nights?"

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  2. Hey JJ - I'll get Juba Nights out soon. I am really happy that people here are so into soccer. Everywhere in town people wear Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal, Barca and AC Milan jersies. Everyone knows every African player in the Premiere League, Bundesliga, La Liga etc...

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