Footballs

Late afternoon

Footballs don't last long on the earthen pitches of Zambia. The ground is covered by layers of cultivated rubbish and fragments of domestic items accumulated over the years of habitation in the compound. Playing barefoot, injuries to the soles and skin are as common as the sun rising each morning and then hanging up there until it goes down again. The academy are short of first aid supplies, especially plasters, which are dear and GoalZambia hopes to help with this. Organised by Coach Mukuka, the academy does put aside a nominal pot of money to deal with hospital fees demanded as a consequence of broken bones or other serious incidents. Families are made aware of this when their children join up. At present this pot of money stands at not very much at all but I couldn't find the exact figure in my notebook.


State of new ball after 90 minutes

 And the balls wear out. In my naivity before my first visit to the country and relying loosely on my sister's advice that I should take some footballs for the kids of the compound - I would have no difficulty getting rid of them - I bought ten cheap two for a fiver sports direct Sondica footballs all shiney and new. Some, out on the Chainda pitch failed to last even the day they were first kicked. Dispite hardened soles, the same happens to human feet but kids have no choice but to play on regardless. To play or not to play is not really a question sometimes. One of the first things I learnt in the country was that a cheap ball will only last a day, whereas a ball of £10 will last up to six weeks. Mathmatics has never been my strong point but in this case, it seems to add up. Better quality balls also tend to be more repairable with a puncture repair kit and some twine. The cars and blue buses along the tarmac road that runs behind one of the goals are a regular decimator of passing footballs fated to bounce no more, there being no fence between the road and the pitch and no hope of something like that being built. That's just the way it is.

Running twine repairs

As elsewhere in Zambia things are not as they seem at first light. I had a final brand shining new, two for a fiver at a two for a fiver sports outlet, football to give away as the time to depart the country after my first visit drew near. There were only a couple of days to go. I took a walk through the Chainda compound late afternoon sun and shade in the hope of finding some children playing football together, which doesn't take long, and offering the ball. Towards the edge of the settlement, near one of the boarded up because there's no one to work there Aids clinics I found about twenty kids running around, chasing a homemade football in need of repair. Identifying the mothers sitting chatting outside one of the houses, I asked if it would be alright to see if the owner of the ball would be happy to swap it for a new one. I wanted to return to the UK with one homemade ball to show children in schools and stuff like that. The mother assured me her son would be more than happy to consider the transaction and swap the ball, indeed he did. We were both quite excited. I put his ball into my bag and, presenting him with the new one, expressed my thanks. With the new ball in his hands he maybe thought similar thoughts but I don't know. As I was walking away I looked behind me to see the same area now devoid of the children playing. They were now hanging around, individually, in pairs or small groups, kicking around in the dust. The boy with the new football had gone into his home, just him and the ball. He'd disappeared. As I walked away from the kids with their ball, now mine, in my bag and with my few days left, away from the remnants of their big match and the mothers and family watching sat there chatting, I sort of felt a tinge of something sad in the quiet absence of the exciting noises of their play. But as I kept walking away toward the tarmac road and home along the edge of the compound where the market stalls are, thinking that there was no way in the world the boy would be able to keep that ball hidden in there, away from his pals for very long at all, no way, I laughed.


My ball

Giske FC

Pre-match photo Dynamic Stars (can't remember who they were playing either)

Blue and white stripes are the colours of Giske FC, the only football team on the small archipelago island of the same name twenty miles or so from the mainland, Norway, and across the exciting looking outcrops of grey that hang out west from the coast on the google map, like big clumsy troll fingers turned to stone, or the tendril like fjords, running blue between them, seeking shelter further inland from some north wind on the westerly coast of the country, where it meets the Norwegian Sea, or in the photograph below. It's a small place with a lot of fisherman/fish and the football club ground is, unsurprisingly, near the sea. The ball keeps going in the water.

Giske

I have a friend from the island (whose not a fisherman but I think her granddad was) and she asked the local team if they had anything to give towards GoalZambia's work in southern Africa. They gave the shirts. They gave equipment; balls, pumps, goal keepers jerseys and plastic cones to run around and more. That's the kind of kit the academy needs (apart from football boots - everybody dreams of a pair of boots but very few have them, even a crap pair. If there are any they are shared around the team. but they rarely fit and literally fall apart before your eyes during a match. Most kids just get on with playing barefooted because they can't wait around for a dream or a pair of boots, whether they fit or not, when the biggest matches in the world come round thick and fast each week). My friend brought them over to London on one of her visits and we got them over to Zambia thereafter. The team had a whip round at the full time whistle of one of their home league matches, raising and donating £350. I don't know who they were playing and what the boat they came on looked like but it doesn't really matter.  Other people and organisations did a similar thing to Giske FC and i'll be posting some of their photographs as and when I do. The  blue and white stripes were a winner though, there was no doubt.

It was difficult to explain to the lads and lasses in the academy where these shirts came from when they put them on although I didn't stop trying. There is not a sea in Zambia and most of the lives of the members have been spent in the compound or those like it, or in their family tribal villages. The lucky ones may have been on a school trip years ago to the Victoria Falls and Livingstone. They don't really remember it that well and seem relatively less impressed than what the travel brochures say. They raised their eyes at me, listening politely, then slightly bemused, when I told them i'd seen my first elephant, like you would in this country to someone who told you they'd just seen their first small cat, mainly, and perhaps simply, because that doesn't happen all that much (something like that anyway). It was hard for them to imagine, I suppose, but they invariably liked the photo of the small island with a lot of fisherman in the middle of the Norwegian Sea and laughed wonderingly at how the inhabitants got there. Zambia is not a seafaring nation.

Giske away

And now I sometimes think about Giske and wonder how it is there and the fisherman and trolls and the football pitch by the sea, even though I have never been. And the boats and the team. I would like to go there one day and watch them play.

Compound Shops

Corner shop

These are some of the shops in the compound, away from the main market areas, the one's your mam might send you to to get something forgotten quickly or if an extra guest turns up for dinner after church on Sunday or Saturday or whatever day you go to church, whatever domination you are. It's where the kids get there lollipops and they are often open before the market stores have opened and after they have shut. They are the compound convenience stores, the corner shops.

 Many families supplement the food they can afford to buy with what they have room to grow around their houses. Some have small areas of land around the compound on which to grow maize or larger family plot further out into the bush away from the urban settlements. Other have familiy plots further afield or in their tribal rural villages and they will go their as families as and when needed to collect provisions or harvest the crops. Any surplus food can be sold or shared with neighbours, hence the shops, small family stalls and tables selling little bags of mealie meal, tomatoes or rape outside people's garden gates.

If you have maize you can cook it at the side of the road and sell it from there to passing trade in motorists or foot commuters. To turn the maize into mealie meal you need a grinder, an relatively expensive piece of equipment and a good source of income itself if you have one. I've discussed with Kelly the possibility of obtaining one for the academy. It remains a possibility. Other shop sell airtel minutes. There are no land lines in the compound and mobile communication is solely through pay as you go. Many shops sell this from k2 (25pence) upwards and the stubs of the voucher litter the ground with the beer cartons and plastic bags. Popcorn making machines are popular and relatively cheap and it's an ingenius marketing ploy to add pink food colouring to it - a real selling point for the kids. Try it at home, it works and it's sort of more fun. Chips, fried at the roadside shack are readily available and always eaten cold with the obligatory salt, loads of it, but no vinegar.

Blaya proud outside his family shop that magically turned up overnight over the road

Chickens are commonly kept and commonly lay eggs, these being sold at the shops. I've never tasted a tastier egg than those laid by Zambian poultry. I have no idea what they eat but you see them wandering the tracks of the compound pecking at it.  The chickens themselves are saved for special occasions or as gifts when popping round to somebody else's house for dinner. Caution needs to be excercised in offering this gift as you can end up waiting three hours for the bird to be cooked or having live chickens running around, waiting to be killed, after inviting guests to eat at your house.

One-man inconvenience shop closed

Children work in shops or help on their family's stalls or selling popcorn, corn, beer or fritters along the side of the road. Child labour is common in the country, especially if unable to attend school, something that Goal Zambia hopes to work towards addressing for the members of the academy. Wages if any are minimal and sometimes just in food. A friend of mine, having recently completed his grade 12 (loosely comparable with GCSE level) only declined the offer of a job with one of the market shops after long discussions with his family, who really need an extra source of income in order to send his younger sister and brother to school. The wages on offer were £15 a month. A bag of mealie meal, sufficient to nourish a grown man for one month, costs £7. The wage on offer was just, only just, too low. The cost of food in Zambia is not much different to the UK, in fact many commodities, un-dreamt of luxuries for the compound communities, and only available from the supermarkets and shopping centres, are noticeably dearer.

Chitumbuwa

Boy with chitumbuwa at pitch

Chitumbuwa or fritters are the kind of food in the country that seems to make the world go around. They are the chips or the on the move snacks, the bacon sandwich on the way to the office in the morning. They are an indelible part of the Zambian culture. They can be used to define the day and, the freshness of them, the time of it. Early in the morning is the best alongside the main roads at the queing cars of the junctions when you vcan see the smoke rises up in the sunshine and floating off in the early morning cool breeze. The smoke is a good sign of the freshness, just cooked and crispy, scalding incredibly too hot to touch fritters and two at that time for is just the right amount for the most perfect breakfast and a garantee of satisfaction through to dinnertime and nshima. Roadside fires heat the black cast iron cauldrons of oil in which the heavy duty pancake like dough mixture, dolloped into balls is deep fried. Twigs are used to transfer these into a plastic serving bucket and the fritters sold to those in need from there. They cost 50 ngwee, 5 pence each and are more, in my opinion, than worth it. In a country where many food items are as, if not more, expensive than here, Chitumbuwa are a occasional affordable treat.

And this is important, this woman with the saucepan in the photograph is a welcome sight on the football pitch. It's what happens to make a match day go around, an integral part of it. She is the fritter woman preparing the pan of oil that the fritters are deep fried in. It's match day, a weekend and early mid-morning,  say around ten o'clock and the pitch is getting busy with the pre-big match nervous players and reverberating with the sound of adrenaline. Kids are gathering to watch the older teams play competitively in the FAZ or Dynamic Ministries league and their favourite players, their local heroes from Chainda and neighbouring compounds are there on the pitch, in front of their eyes, in real life. The young kids stand and stare or show off their keep me ups with their home made or punctured discarded balls, running around the pitch screaming to each other and the older kids do it to impress the lasses. There is an all enveloping sense of excitement that grew from the night before, the days before, and, if a big local rivalry match is scheduled, for weeks before. People arrive with their new proud hair cuts,others laugh at them and you can see the girls in their new braids and wigs. Families from the Seventh Day Adventist pass by in their church best clothes at ease and conscience free to watch a bit of footy on their day of rest when they can't even think about doing the laundry because God, in Zambia, likes football and even predicts the national team scores. He's a Chipolopolo fan.

Preparing the oil in the fritter hut

At the side of the pitch, between it and some corrugated roofed breeze block walled houses is the hut that serves as burger van, the tea stall, the refreshment stand and meeting place. A simple traditional wooden poled fire shelter structure with thatched grass roof round and through which the blue smoke from the newly kindled fire swirls then floats up and away like a part of the whole thing, with it's smell across the pitch and everywhere. The smell can make the belly rumble.

The woman or her daughters get there and light the fire with the yesterdays wood, left there, safely respected. She lives in a nearby house and this is her job. One of her jobs, and the money she makes from it help to feed her family and send some of her relatives to school. The kids in the academy are hungry most of the time. They don't get much to eat and after having fun playing football all day long they need extra sustenance like chips on the way home from a day building sand castles and stopping the incoming tide at the beach. The academy feed the kids at the pitch from the fritter stall on match days and some training days and will also provide mealie meal which some designated members will occasionally cook for the team.

The new academy shop building may be such to accommodate somewhere for the kids to congregate when not in action and somewhere for them to be fed and hang together about between matches. There is nowhere else. On big match days, when the mighty FAZ registered Chainda Bombers team and their local stars are in action, or on cup tie days a few thousand people will gather at the sidelines to watch and it's a good day, those days, for the fritter woman.

From another house near to the fritter woman's a tap provides the academy's water. The lady is paid K20 on a match day for the use of this. There are not many taps in the compound and those there are are shared by the community. Drinking water comes from bore holes dug in the ground beneath the open dry toilets beside the houses. Contamination is common news and Typhoid and dysentery are familiar consequences for the compounds residents. They, like the fritters, are a part of the compound culture too, albeit less welcome.

So, 50g of plain flour, 1 tablespoon of baking powder, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 1 tablespoon of cooking oil and half a cup of milk or if you can't afford it, water. Mix all the ingredients, save the milk or if you can't afford it water, up together and then add the milk/water. Keep going until the mixture is very thick. Prepare the oil, make it hot, as hot as a chip pan before getting a good sized dollop of mixture on a deep spoon already dipped beforehand in the hot oil, and adding this to the pan. Wait on until they are crispy and gorgeous dark golden brown and Bob, as they, whoever they are, say, is your uncle! Enjoy as much as possible!

Perfect, gorgeous as can be examples

And so Kelly will feed the kids and it's a major part of the day and a sure way top get them all together. They will say grace in a group before eating but the taste senses of the mind are already on the food, not the provider, and the prayers, overridden, drift away at the close with the smoke. And the mouths, you can see them watering. Amen's are hasty with eyes open wide, said whilst forming an vague queue before the fritter woman's serving bucket, any order of which rapidly disintegrates to a noisy crowd hiding the woman and her bucket somewhere in the middle. Tricks learnt by the older kids are are played in an effort to get an extra chitumbuwa and the younger kids have to be quick in order to have their fill. No crumbs are left and nothing goes to waste. No kid is left out.