April 23 "Kickball and Choir"

Today began bright and early with kickball. Mr. D&D was hosting a kickball tournament (he has singlehandedly brought kickball to Lusaka), and he wanted me to ump one game for him. So, at 9, about 25 kids piled into the back of the pickup and headed off to meet the other teams. Well, one didn’t show, so there were only three times. I ended up helping ump the first and third games, and someone got hurt, so I played the second game with Kaunda Square. Yours truly scored a few run. J It was just fun hanging out with all the kids and goofing off. My sunglasses got passed around to all the kids who were wearing them and posing with them, of course. R, who is quickly becoming one of my favorites, kept asking me to play with his team, but I said no, that the time was for the kids. Well, it ends up that I ended up playing against him, and hit him in the face with a ball I kicked! Oops! R is a tough little guy though, so he shook it off. The team from the sem ended up winning J which was surprising since the other teams were high schoolers! Before we left the host school had a nice little greeting for all of us and a few games to goof around and play together before leaving. It was a very fun morning. J

On the way back, I found out choir practice wasn’t until 16 hours, instead of 14, so I had some extra free time, since it was already 13:15 when I got back. Remember that to do list I was made up yesterday? Well, I spent the next several hours trying to accomplish a few things. I feel like the list is never ending (kind of like the book the To Do List that I read last month), but it made me feel a bit accomplished.

At 16 hours, T and I headed over to the church for choir practice. The choir had invited us to sing with them a few weeks ago, so today we joined. Well, it was quite an experience! All the songs are in Nyanja or other local dialects. None of the words are written to read. They don’t practice the lyrics, they just start doing the call and response singing. So that’s how T and I tried, too. So, on top of learning 15 new songs for tomorrow, we were learning them in African languages, having no idea what we were saying. On top of that, the choir does different dances to each song, too, so I had to pretend that I had African rhythm and dance on top of the singing. But it was fun. J Have I mentioned that I’ve never been in a real choir in my life? We must have been ok though, because they invited us to sing with them tomorrow and come to practice the following day!

After choir, T and I unfortunately had to sit down and stare at and try to make sense of our cost spreadsheet. That wasn’t too fun, but we’re a bit closer to figuring it out. By this time I had the hymns for tomorrow, so practicing piano was next. Hopefully my musical extravaganza tomorrow will go well! Then we made some sandwiches for dinner, and settled in with a few movies (since that’s the only thing we can do at night!) and watched The Guardian and Ocean’s 11. Not a super stellar Saturday, but it’s nice to have those down days sometimes, too.