“There’s a khawaja here that wants to play football.”
Khawaja is the word for “white person” in these parts and this is apparently what Dele, the base manager, told the captain of a local girls team in Yei. I was surprised to find that there’s even a girls' league. I was less surprised to find that the league consists of two and a half teams, and the girls don’t always show up to practice.
Dele invited Harriet to RECONCILE to meet me. Yei is a city, so I think it’s automatically not as conservative as more rural areas, where it’s probably unheard of for a girl to play soccer. Still, I’ve got to admit, I automatically thought that this girl’s got something like gumption (to use a term from another decade). She boldly has her sights set on being a serious female athlete in a country where the priorities are such that somewhere around 90 percent of women are illiterate. So of course I got her phone number and learned that the first practice I would be able to attend was at six on Saturday. That’s six AM.
A few mornings later, I awoke to someone knocking on my door, confusedly seeing one of the compound guards outside my window and hearing, “It’s me, Harriet!” I opened the door and saw her in full soccer garb (A Chelsea kit she was given, but unfortunately she’s a Man-U fan). I hurriedly changed in the dark, since it was early enough that the electricity hadn’t cut on yet.
Once we got to the RECONCILE gate entrance, we started to jog, since it was a kilometer and a half to the center of town and we were a bit late. The entire time I was wondering how strange we must have looked. One hardly sees a girl in pants in town or a khawaja walking along the side of the road since most work for NGOs and use vehicles. Indeed, every time I walk anywhere I get “Khawaja, Khawaja!” and a varied host of stares, random questions and greetings from the people near the road. Hopefully this illustrates how unusual it must have been to see the pair of us jogging on down the road in sports clothing. Luckily, there were few vehicles or observers on the road to question our spectacle since it was barely dawn.
We ran all the way to the center of town, or Freedom Square, which is a giant, dusty square of dirt. There were already several groups there playing soccer in this huge area and there were only two other girls ready to play. After I introduced myself and Harriet and I warmed up, we discovered the main reason why so few girls appeared: It was Friday. I always thought that being on South Sudanese time meant being a few to several minutes late, but apparently it means not sticking strictly to the day of the week either. Still, Harriet led us to join in a game of keep-away with some men nearby. They were very inclusive, and I saw people join and leave the game intermittently, never interrupting the flow or causing anyone to raise objection. Of course, the entire time, we were the only four girls playing in the entire area.
As time went on, the town gradually woke up with us and the roads got busier. This meant that the area where we were playing, which was near the road, got more bicycle, boda and landcruiser traffic. At least fifteen times, we continued playing while these vehicles and pedestrians intersected our game.
The next day (on the actual day we were supposed to practice), Nancy, one half of the American couple that just recently arrived to work at RECONCILE, opted to come to practice, since she played ball in college. Although more girls showed up this time, we still had to invite some boys to flesh out our somewhat chaotic game of keep-away.
Harriet and her friend Sarah were sweet enough to offer to provide an “escort” home both mornings, amidst calls from men on the side of the street asking them, “Where did you find those white ladies?!”
Several hours later, while I was away at the market, Harriet stopped by the compound and left the message that the friendly match they said would be on Tuesday was moved to Sunday, the next day. The coach had organized for us to play with a U-14 boys team, since there was little female competition to be had.
I showed up at the scheduled playing time for the game, 4:00 pm, to discover that no recognizable players were there. Once again, I’m still getting used to South Sudanese time.
Some time later, once we were outfitted and organized, Harriet led the warm-up of girls, starting with jogging in two lines. While I began to think it was an exercise to which I was accustomed, I was soon mistaken as the warm-up progressively and beautifully turned out to have a flow and movement to it that seemed more like a dance. Even the static stretching had a rhythm to it somehow, as the leader clapped in transition. While the team continued warming up, we were surrounded by a sizable and growing crowd of interested onlookers. They were mostly young boys, a few of whom my less serious teammates took the initiative to flirt with. As if to foreshadow the attention that I would receive later, I was already starting to hear some of them talk about me from this crowd.
Once the referees decided to finally quit stalling, the players walked toward the field and one of my teammates told me, “don’t have fear.” I kind of laughed in confusion, thinking of how many soccer games I had played in with higher stakes than a friendly match.
Then I got past the crowd surrounding our warm up and looked at the field.
I s*** you not, there had to have been at least three hundred people prepared to watch the game. That may have been the first time since coming to South Sudan that I wondered, “How did I get here? Is this real life?”
Only two-thirds of the girls had shoes and all of the boys were barefoot. Despite this, the boys wore relatively nice uniforms and the game had a great deal of formality. There were even decent sideline refs who actually made offside’s calls, which is a luxury I think a girl hardly has the pleasure to experience in the US. There was someone to rush the field when players went down injured and the assistant coach was quick to rub wounds with disinfectant (Using the same rag for everyone…) where needed and lavished attention on the players at half time.
Then I got past the crowd surrounding our warm up and looked at the field.
I s*** you not, there had to have been at least three hundred people prepared to watch the game. That may have been the first time since coming to South Sudan that I wondered, “How did I get here? Is this real life?”
Only two-thirds of the girls had shoes and all of the boys were barefoot. Despite this, the boys wore relatively nice uniforms and the game had a great deal of formality. There were even decent sideline refs who actually made offside’s calls, which is a luxury I think a girl hardly has the pleasure to experience in the US. There was someone to rush the field when players went down injured and the assistant coach was quick to rub wounds with disinfectant (Using the same rag for everyone…) where needed and lavished attention on the players at half time.
The crowd was animated the entire game, making noise anytime someone came near a goal or made a decent pass or steal. I attempted to ignore how many counts of “khawaja” I could hear from the sideline and some of the strange comments I received. I wasn’t nearly as impressive athletically as I had hoped to be, since I was playing on unfamiliar terrain, in an unfamiliar position (position 9. They use numbers to describe positions on the field), and the girls were employing the infuriating tactic of kick and run. Despite the fact that some of these boys were about three feet tall, they pummeled us, making the final score six to zero and possessing the ball probably 75 percent of the game.
The end of the game only yielded frustration for Harriet and myself, while the others maintained smiles and commenced chewing on sugar cane (…which I initially confused for bamboo, but don’t tell anyone). Harriet lamented later about how uncommitted and flippant the girls are about playing, my respect for her continuing to grow while she exhibited dedication to play amidst others’ apathy and disinterest.
I’m not so sure that I’ve quite accurately described my entire experience for the reader, but if there were ever a moment where I felt like life was surreal, that game had to have been it. Onlookers asked some of my teammates where I came from, and I’m not sure how I would have even answered that question. Fortunately, these girls just answered simply, "She is my sister," or "my friend."
