Frisbee

Cameroonians are clean people. So clean, in fact, that it's rare for their clothes to show dirt - even on the dustiest of days - unless they are farming, working construction, or doing some other form of work that necessitates getting dirty. Generally, if you see at dusty, dirty person out about in town, it's safe to say their probably mentally ill and/or homeless. Children are scolded for getting themselves dirty - though this is pretty much inevitable.

Needless to say, then, heads turned today when a white lady (me) carrying a strange white disk (a frisbee) took off today with a gaggle of ecstatic children to the nearby football/soccer pitch (grassless, of course), lined the children up by height, divided the group into two teams (Les Tigres v. Les Elephants), and proceeded to engage in a strange game in which children routinely splayed out in the dirt, kicking up a storm of dust, and shrieking with laughter all the while.

After a long hiatus since college, I began playing Ultimate Frisbee again in my hometown of Portland, Maine this past fall. I had a blast playing with PortSports, and will definitely play again this spring. For the time being, however, I'm going to work on molding this group of rag-tag kids into two somewhat-organized frisbee teams. Our biggest obstacle today was understanding the fact that when a team scores, both sides change directions. Second biggest problem was knowing who was one whose team. I'm going to buy some cloth in the market tomorrow to make colored arm/headbands to distinguish teams. We made a LOT of progress in understanding that one can't run with the frisbee, but only after having to stop the game on multiple occasions to re-explain that the person in possession of the frisbee must be planted like a tree.

Probably the most exciting thing about the game today was the fact that, of the four or five kids who really got what was going on, two of them were girls. I had one girl go "long" (on a pretty short field) for me for several spectacular goals.

Needless to say, we were ridiculously filthy when we returned back to the chefferie. So dirty that the old women sitting outside their houses clucked at me in disapproval (but also found the whole situation pretty entertaining). I'll take that as a compliment.

Comments

[Shea Gunther]

How's their zone looking?

:D