Anders in India: The Football Session

"Uncle, uncle, one picture PLEASE"

I heard that one about a million times on Wednesday, from all of the primary kids in the batch of students that had a football (soccer) session yesterday. The football program is one of Dream A Dream's projects which focuses on team-building exercises, and there are a lot of discussions both before and after the kids play.

Dream A Dream partners with around a dozen schools around the city, and we went to one with a couple of buses to pick up the children and drove them over to a university campus that had a really good grass field. All the kids were excited, and took it as a picnic trip – they were all busy eating and sharing snacks in the bus, happily chatting with each other and trying hard to pronounce my name. These children had all done the program last year, and seemed to be really into it. The session started with warm-ups, check-ins and a talk on team agreement rules that the students had to suggest and vote on. After playing for a little less than half an hour, they had a cool-down and a brief discussion about the day’s events plus some energizers.

It was a fantastic experience to see how these programs actually work in the field. I participated in some of their exercises and interacted a bit with the kids, and just seeing their happy faces as they talk with each other and play football is an amazing thing. I also spent a lot of time talking to Poornima, a new acquaintance from that day, about photography as we both had our DSLR cameras out and documented the session. After they were done the kids all wanted to have their pictures taken; they were constantly calling out to us, posing, pushing around and messing up each others shots. It was crazy but quite funny.