Sports Day

Sports Day

It really isn’t possible to describe the magnitude of each school’s sports days here in Kabala. Typically, each school puts on a 2-day event (although CRC’s really turned into more like a 4 day), which slightly resembles an inter-school track meet back home. Each school in Kabala and the nearby villages make sure that their sports days fall on separate days so that people from the community will not have to choose between which event to go to (and yes, most of the community comes to watch each school’s meet).
CRC Primary’s Games and Sports Committee (which included myself, 2 other teachers and JT the headmaster) basically had to plan for around 3 months in order to get everything together in time. Just a few examples of things we had to get ready: going to Freetown for $200 worth of photocopies for advertisements, certificates, programs, and many other materials needed, paying for and reserving a PA system for both days, building 4 temporary shelters (“booths”) for each of the houses and one large booth for dignitaries, honored guests, etc., turning our field into a track with lanes using garden tools, and reserving a band from the local high school to help us with the “match pass.” A match pass, by the way, is when the whole school (students, teachers and most parents) gathers in their house colors on one end of town, and marches/dances/sings/cheers/yells its way behind a generator-and-sound-system-carrying pickup truck all the way through town for a couple hours until they reach their school.
As the Sports Day Supervisor, I obviously had to be present the entire time at our event, which went from around 11 am to 7:00 pm both days, which happened to be the hottest days of the year (around 45+ degrees).
I am going to try and explain how these sports days “look,” which is pretty much the same for all the schools. All the students are divided into one of 4 houses: red, orange, blue, and green. They hang out, all day, underneath their booth they have constructed in one of the 4 corners of the field with their “house master” - the teacher representing that house. There’s also a larger booth for tables, trophies, a sound system, the announcer, and a bunch of VIP’s, officials, and honored guests. In the middle of the field (in the sun) there’s around 20+ volunteers in charge of judging, scorekeeping, calling the events, and so on.
The events. Mostly track-type events…sprints, high and long jump, etc, but there are also a number of “fun” events like egg-and-spoon, musical chairs, and a dancing competition. So for example, picture 8 6 - year - old kids all dressed in their specific colors in the middle of the field playing musical chairs with hundreds of people watching and cheering. The crazy thing is that people aren’t only cheering because it’s really cute, funny, and so on. They actually care who wins. Well, “care” is a drastic understatement. Even Fraser Valley Christian’s athletic department doesn’t get this competitive. There was one moment during musical chairs where a red house competitor (and by “competitor” I mean cute little innocent class 1 boy) fell and straddled the chair before a blue house kid came and sat on the chair. All eyes fell to me, as supervisor, for a decision, and red house actually threatened to leave when I ruled in favor of blue house. Cries came from all sides for established written rules as to what exactly is meant by “sitting.” I said a better idea would be to take a collective chill pill. These sorts of moments neither few nor fart between.
Academic events. Every school has pretty much the exact same events at their sports days, but I came up with a few academic ones at CRC’s, all of which looked pretty much the same. At “go,” the kids from each house run halfway across the field to a pocket chart, where they unscramble a word or the letters of the alphabet, or do a times table, or spell a word correctly, or arrange tins with letters on them in alphabetical order. I thought the events went OK, but could have easily been improved upon, but apparently everyone else thought they were amazingly innovative. The interesting part is that every school which is having their sports day after our own is doing all the exact same academic events. No other schools have pocket charts, so 2 have already called dibs to use ours (most of our trophies are currently on loan as well). I guess it’s possibly that these events could be fixture in Kabala sports days for years to come. Too bad I missed my opportunity to call them after myself….
Predictably, the schedule ran overtime (thanks in part to a lengthy opening ceremony which took place a couple hours before the end of the whole event), so the closing awards ceremony had to take place on the following Monday. Luckily, I was in Freetown and missed the ceremony where 1st, 2nd, and 3rd for every event was individually presented with a certificate. wow.
Thoughts on the day: a cool insight into Kabala culture, and I’m glad to have been a part of it, and it certainly was like no event I’ve seen before, but I’m glad I don’t have to plan one every year, and if it was up to me I wouldn’t keep score. I’ll suggest it, but I think people care way too much who wins to go for it.

ps. I have a million pictures of the match pass, but not a single one of our sports day, as we used our parents' camera on those days. We will try and get our hands on them and post a couple.