We had a relatively quiet day, resting up after a week of hard work. The treat for the day was that Adrien invited us to join him and Jonathan at a football game- Burundi v. Cameroon. We then asked Eric, one of our Burundian workcamp counterparts, to join us. After watching much of the World Cup 2 years ago I must say I was very excited to see my first live game. It's quite different from watching, say, a Cubs game.
1. It costs the equivalent of $5.
2. Policemen with guns check your ticket.
3. You watch from inside, essentially, a giant cage.
4. There's only an announcer at the beginning and the end and no place I could see where anyone keeps score. Though considering the kind of scores football usually has, it's not at all hard to remember.
5. No one gets up and walks around during the game.
6. During the entire 1 st 1/2 no one tried to sell anyone anything. At half time 2 guys went around with cardboard boxes filled with a variety of sweets. No beverages were for sale.
7. No one was drunk.
Cameroon won, 1-0, but it was still great fun to watch. There was constant commentary going on all around us- in Kirundi of course so we understood none of it. Occasionally Adrien would lean over and give us the gist of the conversations, people are mad at the coach, the players don't get paid very much so how can you expect them to play well, seriously what is the coach thinking? I like that it really felt like a community event. People weren't just talking to their neighbors but to everyone within hearing distance. There was lots of back and forth like friends watching a game in a bar. If you happen to have 200 friends and go to a bar that serves no drinks, just Tootsie Pops and foil packets of cookies.
After the game all the players on both sides had plastic bottles of water which they drank and then threw down on the field. In minutes the field was rushed by about 3 dozen kids from the bleachers. I thought they were coming to mob the players but what they were really after were the bottles. In about 20 seconds they'd collected them all and then just generally romped around on the field. A bunch were doing cartwheels and I even saw a few back handsprings- clearly self taught. The rest just threw themselves at the ground, I guess enjoying the spring in the grass. Eventually one lone policeman- unarmed- came to shoo them away and I had to laugh at how soundly he was ignored. The three kids closest to him would look like they were starting to walk off the field but then as soon as he turned around to point at someone else, they'd come right back.
On the way home, right by our corner we passed 2 piles of burning garbage. One of the things I will not miss about Bujumbura is the frequent smoke and smell of burning garbage. The first couple of nights I was here I kept thinking someone was standing right under the window, smoking a cigarette. Turns out it was just garbage fires down wind of us (or is it up wind?). There's a haze over the entire city from the hundreds of smoldering piles. That's what you do it seems if there's no public garbage collection service, if you can't reuse it, you burn it.
Once we got back home Jonathan gave me a vocabulary lesson, teaching me the Kirundi words for head, hair, hand, fingers, mouth, nose and of course, butt. I called him umwigisha wanje (my teacher) so I'm guessing I'd better study because he'll probably quiz me when we return to work on Monday.
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