Over the last two months, I've been playing two sports on a regular basis. Every Friday, the teachers and janitors (at this point, mostly janitors) play soccer after school (this has been going on since the beginning of the year, actually). And since school started up after Christmas, I've been playing school-yard baseball with a bunch of my grade 7 boys at lunch, which I started doing because I was assigned to lunch-time duty in the outdoor gym area. Needless to say, duty is way more fun than it was before.
These two activities have evolved over time, and in the very recent past, both have taken a dramatic turn for the worse/better, respectively. Actually, better isn't the right word. More like hilariouser.
Sometime in January, we played our second match against a rival school, and the first since the famous pants incident linked to above. During the match, one of our players, who is not a soccer player at all, and was only there because he was the one who set it up because he used to work there or something, suffered a serious ankle (+/- one bone away) sprain (+/- one degree of seriousness) (the uncertainty factors are given because his lack of English prevents me from knowing exactly what his injury was), and had to miss a couple weeks of school. Then, last week, at a regular Friday intra-squad scrimmage (somehow I doubt anyone else refers to it this way), one of the tech guys broke his wrist/hand (bad injury for a computer guy).
So now it seems soccer is over for the rest of the year. (Except today, for some reason. I never really know what's going on, but I think the deal is this: the director was upset because of all the injuries, so now we can't play anymore, but the director, the high school principal and the dean of discipline are all away right now for various reasons, so we're gonna play in about an hour and shhhhhh.) Which is too bad, because it's really fun, and I was planning on bringing my friend Ben to play a game when he comes to visit in April. It's definitely one of the most Colombian things in my normal routine.
On the other hand, lunchtime baseball has really kept me on my toes in the last few days. I mentioned in the last paragraph that the head honchos of the school are away; well, one of the reasons is that there's a big sports tournament all week in Cartagena, a city about 2 hours from here. One of the effects is that the phys. ed hut is locked at lunchtime (because there are no phys. ed teachers), meaning the boys can't access the baseball equipment. So they've had to make do with what they have. Which means, basically, coconuts and pylons.
The game that has become the default game this week is basically soccer baseball with a coconut. The most entertaining aspect unique to cocosoccerbaseball is that when the pitcher rolls the "ball", it has the potential to veer wildly off-course, resulting in some idiotic-looking kick-flails. (The other most entertaining thing is when the boys forget to save the coconut from the last recess, they get a new one by standing on a ledge and throwing their shoes at the coconut tree until one drops.)
One day they had a tennis ball for some reason, so it became a slightly more civilized version of the previous game, tenniscocosoccerbaseball. But that ball mysteriously disappeared, and today it was back to the coconut version.
But the best game came a couple days ago when I arrived to find the boys each holding a pylon, chasing after the coconut, and trying to score on the basketball net. Though initially confounded, I eventually figured out the rules: it was coconut-basketball, but you could only pass the ball by throwing and having your teammate catch it in their (mini) pylon. And when the coconut was not caught, there was a mad scramble until somebody trapped it under their pylon, giving them the coconut-rights.
Even though I often join their game, this time I decided to be a neutral play-disturber (major team sports should have more of these). So I picked up the one huge pylon, and meandered through the game, randomly lowering the pylon over kids' heads while they were trying to shoot, and trapping any coconut that came my way in my huge "glove".
I'm sure that regularly-scheduled-baseball-programming will resume next week, which will be fun, but it's no CocoPylonSketball. What a week.
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