Five weeks down and two to go, that sounds way too short, so without further ado, let’s start where we always do.
In the beginning…
You may remember from last week that our glorious leaders, [Chris and Priscilla], had cancelled the weekend. This meant that some of us still had work to do before we could rest, and what better work on a Sunday morning than sensitisations at two contrasting churches.
The first was a community Baptist church, the regular Sunday haunt of team leader Priscilla, while the second was the quieter Lighthouse church of Rebecca, our much missed colleague.
As a practicing catholic I assumed I knew what a church service would be like, readings, hymns and a sermon from the priest… I was wrong. The community Baptist service was a phenomenal experience, something like a heavy-metal rock concert if the lead singer had the charisma of Freddy mercury, the religious beliefs of Bono and had been listening to Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” a lot. It was a celebration of energy and belief. The second church, however, was far calmer, more like a familiar catholic service with the Pastor leading prayers and preaching the good news. At each church, team leader Pricilla, Dominic and I gave a short presentation on our project, emphasising our “disability isn’t inability” moto, [meaning I got to boast about cool things I have done], and encouraging them to attend our events later this month. The highlight, however, came when our quiet and shy team leader Pricilla came alive with the mike in her hand standing before her home church started a chant of “power” that would not have been out of place at a Nina Simone concert .
In an unusual turn of events, Sunday was followed by Tuesday as our team leaders temporarily reinstated the weekend by giving us Monday off.
We attacked Tuesday with a will and Team leader Chris set me the ludicrous target of creating 60 elbow pads. Fortunately my middle name is ludicrous [actually it’s Marius but close enough] so I started collecting water sachets for my work. I was aided in this collection by Ross and Emma who both handed me huge sacks of empty sachets they’ve been hanging on to for weeks.
In the afternoon we joined Ross, our very own mad professor in training [he’s still missing an evil laugh and an albino cat] to work on assorted projects with various tools too fun to leave the International Service office. Hamza and Mahe worked on cardboard and papier mache goalball mats while a larger group worked on stencilling REACT logos on the equipment and constructing a beautiful banner [that I christened Brian Abanna]. Ross gave me the task of removing all the sharp nicks and edges from some plastic eye-shade templates with an electric sander. [as someone who works mainly by touch an electric sander would be daunting if I didn’t have hours of experience from some family friends who live on a farm and employ guests as indentured labour, building strong and stable doors for horses and the like.]
Wednesday was more of the same from Tuesday with the addition of Team leader Chris also setting us the task of developing a sachet knee pad, a far more complicated job than simple elbow pads.
Thursday saw our test event, teaching goalball to another International Service team on the volleyball court at the university. We needed to see how our teaching methods would work and hoped to also drum up support and interest for a similar event the next day that would be open to the public. Fun was apparently had by all, although it did take me a while to realise that Hattie [short for Harriot] and Fatty [short for Fatima] were two different people and not one cruelly mocked individual.
Friday was a day for trust as I left a small team to conduct a 9 AM radio interview without me while team leader Chris left us to run the morning goalball drop-in at the university.
The drop-in was a huge success with a number of host families joining in games as well as hordes of students who were already kitted up for various sports in the area. [What is the noun for a group of students? Is it hoard?]
Meanwhile, at the radio Tamale studio, team leader Chris, Hassana, Dominic and Mahe made a good show in front of, according to official statistics from the station themselves, 10,000 listeners. I have not yet heard the recording however Team leader Chris admitted to me that he struggled with reading from a script but improvised successfully, making him my kind of guy. [Reading isn’t my strong suit, even if I am a news broadcaster on Wandsworth Radio back at home.]
Saturday was our third goalball training day in a row, this time it was back to the old stadium for a session with the local tamale team, or teams. It turns out that there are two, tamale metro and Sagnarigu. Our hope is that both teams will compete separately in the tournament on the 22nd of May. So we split them in two and started drilling defence and attack in separate teams. After a few minutes of practicing the important defensive positions of goalball we entered a three game mini-competition with spare players from Tamale Metro and Sagnarigu forming a bonus team. The contest was well fort and players were showing notable improvement in blocking and shooting.
Part way through the round-robin I took over the duty of distracting children and, like the pied piper, lead about twenty noisy children away from the goalball game with a zoomball set after spending 10 minutes untangling the strings and bottles that appear to follow the ironing board principle, [the degree to which an ironing-board tangles with the irons lead is inversely proportional to the time it is left unattended].
But as the bells of progress jingle on in the goalball of time, and the player of destiny realises he is about to be hit in the box of eternity, we draw one more week to a close. a week of sports, events and sporting events. Our attention has certainly shifted now that we have the basic kit we wanted. We have started our push towards bringing in people and educating the public about exactly what a blind person’s limits are and given some a perspective on the challenges of being blind.
So until next week it’s goodbye
Goodbye
Blog by Richard Wheatley
Richard is a stand-up comedian who is performing more than fifty times at the Edinburgh Fringe this August.