Super September

For this post, I'm just going to let my pictures tell the story...

What's that white stuff? Our turf after a hail storm...
About as close to snow as I will see here

All the Cape-terns after the Cape Town Marathon 10K

A BEAUTIFUL sunrise from the Kloof Roof

RV United, a women's team from Khayelitsha coached by the FFHC's program coordinator Vuyo, celebrating after beating University of Cape Town the final game of their season. This is team I coached in the early in my time in Kheyelitsha, and it was truly special to watch from the sidelines as RV clinched promotion to the South African women's professional league. One team made up of players who grew in the townships and have never been outside of Cape Town, another of players from a 14,000 student university who come from all over the world, and the former comes out victorious. Simply amazing

FFHC Holiday Tournament 

(aka Eric's biggest project so far) 

Coach Lucky leading the Undr-11 age group in an energizer before their life skills session

Well attended tournament games

Soccer technical station run by yours truly

Lucky Leading a Fact/Nonsense exercise with the Under-11's

U15 Tournament game between Real Future and Harare Stars

Take a Stand: the central exercise for our life skills sessions

The Champions: Bafana United Sweeps U11 and U15 Tournaments

September Week 2: Episode 2

Two-fer Thursday

After such a monumental day on Weds, Thursday night found me in classic Barthold form. I had spent the previous couple weeks trying without success to play for a local men's club team from Camp's Bay, which lies just on the other side of Signal Hill from our apartment, and I received a call from one of the players at 4:15 asking if I could play in a 6:30 game. I was feeling the urge to have a nice and relaxed evening, but this was my chance to debut for Camps Bay FC! I worked it out in my head...it would be perfect. I could leave Khayelitsha at 5, drop the second GRS car off at HQ by 5:40 so that someone else could use it the following day, run up the hill to Kloof and get there a little after 6, grab my soccer stuff and a peanut butter and honey sandwich before taking a taxi to Camps Bay, and arrive at the field at 6:20. And then the game would end right around 8:30, and I could take another taxi so that I could make it to our GRS team's 5v5 game at 9:00 back in Cape Town proper!

Camp's Bay FC's Field

Yes, it was a little nuts, but I'm so glad I did. The evening was so perfect, Camp's Bay FC's field sits right on the ocean, and I made a great debut for the whole second half (at left back, of all places) in a tough 1-0 loss to their main rivals Green Point. I was a little late to the 5v5 game but I made it for the second half - much to my teammates delight, for they only had one substitute until I arrived. One of the former interns who plays with us turned to me at one point to say, "Thank you so much for coming even after you already played" as if I had sacrificed something to make sure they had enough numbers. Looking back at the craziness of my last 5 hours, I laughed and replied, "Are you kidding me? Two games in one night? I would do this every day if I could!"

Until the next installment...and if you find yourself bored before then, do a google map search of "Camp's Bay FC, the Meadway, Camp's Bay South Africa." It's definitely not the worst location for a football pitch!

September Week 2: Episode 1

I can't remember what I did before Wednesday. I remember the sad Tuesday afternoon departure of our fearless leader, Jeff Devereux, who was in the previous class of interns but stayed on for an extra month and quickly became a mentor and friend for all of us new Cape-terns. Other than that, it's hard for me to recall anything else. The tail end of the week brought with it enough tasks, adventures and special moments to last me a month. I will try to bring my readers into some of those moments, but it may take more than one post. And unfortunately (at least for you all), I'm not sure things will be slowing down anytime in the next two weeks. If you all promise to be patient, I promise to do my best to keep up.

Jeff Dev's Departure Dinner Celebration with interns, former interns, and friends

What a Wednesday:
I mentioned in my last post that we are revamping an after-school soccer league called Community League, and said that this league may be the forum into which I can best develop my masculinity discussions into GRS and Football for Hope programming. The Community League is a well-funded project in which 6 person teams play in league games and then participate in GRS life skills programs when their team is not on the field (the latter of which is where I should be able to pilot the Man Box). There are close to 700 participants, with each day of the week dedicated to a different age group. Members of the community also volunteer to referee the games. Despite the massive amount of potential that this Community League has, however, it has previously been a very informal project run by just a couple people and the money dedicated to the program often is only spent on trophies, soccer balls, etc at the termination of the grant cycle just to use it. So, with the guidance and motivation of Jeff Dev, I have taken the Community League project on as my baby, and Wednesday was a complete "crunch time" day.

Having drawn up a budget for the remaining grant funds with Jeff Dev and having met with Poppy (a site staff member who currently runs Community League) to outline the league's schedule from next week until the grant's end in February, I had a great discussion with Vuyo (our site's program coordinator) to create job descriptions for four new Community League positions early Wednesday morning. We decided to have four league coordinators under Poppy, each of whom will be in charge of a separate age group and have one of the following responsibilities: Matches and Results Coordinator, Life Skills Coordinator, and Two Referee Coordinators. I left feeling ready to take on the world, with my efforts finally looking like they were going to materialize into something new and exciting.

My excitement only increased after I met with Bukeka (or Bukie for short), a GRS coach, for my first 1on1 "Eric and Anna's Employability and Computer Restaurant" session immediately following the discussion with Vuyo. It was so great to see how excited and appreciative Bukie was to  have the chance to set up her own email, but more so to simply talk with someone about the future. We connected so well, and so many of her views about facilitating, teaching, and even general thoughts about the job searching process aligned with mine. The smile I wore after leaving Vuyo's office grew another few centimeters...

Our 1on1 came to an abrupt end when I had to drive Bukie and a bunch of the other female coaches to a school for Skillz Street, GRS's female specific program. Both the departing and returning car rides were full of laughter (often at my expense), and the session in school was my favorite practice to watch. Both coaches and participants were so fired up all session, and it was amazing to see how the students took charge of the session and just let loose. Cindy, they were most definitely on your wavelength

After Skillz Street and the long trek back to Kloof in the Avanza, I still didn't find a time to breathe. I had to ran up the hill to look over into Camps Bay (remember that name, because you will see it again) to get my blood pumping, then there was the issue of dinner before I had to sit down at our kitchen table to actually write up the job descriptions that Vuyo and I had outlined earlier that morning. Jordin Sparks and Kelly Clarkson music took me all the way to 11pm, when I had four polished job descriptions and an additional goals for Poppy as director. I left the house at 8 in the morning and didn't stop until 11 - my kind of a day :) May there be many more like it!

1 Month In

I apologize to my blog viewers for failing to complete my usual Sunday post last week. As often happens, time ran away from me…sigh. Speaking of which, I've already been here for a month!?! That can't be...

Before I get too far into the main content of the post, I have to give a huge shout-out to Colby Men’s Soccer, who open their season today in Waterville. If anyone wants to tune in, the game will be streamed on the Colby website at 1:30 EST. Williams is going to have no idea what hit them.

Turning back to the southern hemisphere, I had possibly the best day yet in South Africa last Saturday. All the interns headed up to Stellenbosch for the weekend, with wine tour of a various vineyards serving as the main attraction. For Scott Sanderson and me, however, there was only one place to go in Stellenbosch: the mountain biking trail network in the Jankershoek Valley. I scrambled to find a mountain bike the week beforehand, and struck gold with a brand new Schwinn Moab 26r for a whopping 4000 Rand ($400). While the rest of the interns piled into a wine tour bus (with a driver who had been a pro mountain biker in the 80’s and therefore completely supported our decision not to join him in the bus), Scott and I loaded our two bikes into our trusty Toyota Avanza and bolted straight to Jankershoek, a natural reserve about 10 minutes outside of Stellenbosch. We reached the parking lot in the pouring rain, but we took our chance when we saw the clouds thinning only a few minutes after we arrived.

With the suggestions of two riders who had just finished, we set out on what soon became one of the most enjoyable rides I’ve been. We climbed a dirt road on one side of the valley and descended a single track that sent me flying into mud puddle multiple times, and then promptly ascended the other side of the valley via a very technical single-track (because why would we ever stop at only one side!?!). At the height of the Jankershoek, we skirted the bottom of a long series of cliffs extending up into the cloud cover and then plunged down one of the steepest descents I’ve ever ridden. The downpour resumed just as we finished, prompting a most necessary stop at the reserve entrance’s small café for some hot chocolate and French Toast. The two of us could not stop grinning for hours, and our smiles only widened at the puzzled expressions on our fellow inters’ faces when we walked into the hostel with mud spots all over our faces.

In other news, I had the opportunity to do the Man Box with all the site staff in Khayelitsha. For those who don’t know, the Man Box is the core exercise to all the masculinity conversations that I facilitated with the male sports teams at Colby and multiple schools and teams around the Upper Valley. I presented the activity to see whether the activity could translate to South African and Xhosa culture, in the hope that maybe we could incorporate it into the various GRS and Football for Hope Center programs. Although I felt a bit rusty after not presenting it in a few months, the discussion went very well. They really enjoyed it, asked some great questions, and I could clearly see a few of them still mulling things over after we formally finished. The same pressures of gender that American boys feel also push boys in the townships to form gangs that are hugely destructive to their local communities, and the site staff agreed that they would love to see a similar masculinity curriculum built with the help of their local perspective. I could pilot the program in the after-school community league that we are currently revamping, and if successful, it could become the first curriculum built specifically for the FFHC Khayelitsha.  I first need to concentrate my efforts on building up the community league’s structure so that we have a platform on which to place such a program, but the vision is there. Ladies and gentlemen, MAV is coming to Africa.