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.

Taking notes. Photo Credit: Poornima Mysore

Bonus question: Can anyone figure out what movie this structure was in?

The Start of a New Beginning

The humidity was the first thing I noticed when I stepped outside the airport. It wasn’t oppressive, just engulfing. Not worse than what you experience in Ohio during the summer though, so no worries there. I had just landed at 4:30am local time with Phu, a classmate participating in the GSE program in Bangalore, after flying for over 16 hours. We made our way over to the bus stop and found a bus going into the city. On the way we both felt a strange familiarity from the sights – to myself, the sparse stretch of shops and buildings looked both similar yet very different from suburban Kigali City in Rwanda. Sitting on the bus, we both began to realize that we had finally arrived in Bangalore.

In spite of having traveled for a day and a half through 10.5 time zones, I felt surprisingly awake. I realized it must be because in US time, it was late evening which is the when I’m most active. My trip had started at 5:30am Wednesday morning, just outside of Wooster, arriving in Cleveland at 6:45 in plenty time for my morning bus to Chicago. The past three days had been a flurry of late night packing, closing procedures for ResLife, reassembling beds, moving stuff into storage in the wee hours of the morning and emptying out my room, so I had only been sleeping a few hours a night. In Chicago, I had some time to kill before meeting Phu so I had my typical Subway traveling lunch and got my hair cut (finally). We flew out of O’Hare International airport with Etihad Airways at 9:30pm, and had a 3-hour stopover in Abu Dhabi. Flying for 13 hours straight in our first leg was the longest I had done before, but it went perfectly smooth – the food was good, there were plenty of movies to watch, and drinks were free.

It is in the middle of the night as I am writing this; I woke up from jetlag around 3:30am. I feel quite accomplished from my first 24 hours: I found my way to the project office for DreamConnect with an autorickshaw where I met the staff, we located a PG room for me (Rs 6,500/month incl. 16 meals a week), and I learned how to use the bus system. The room is literally 2 minutes walk from the office, there’s a gym right around the corner, and there are plenty of shops nearby so I really like the arrangement. I have to go back to DreamConnect today and get started on planning work, and on Sunday I’ll probably move my stuff into the room. I’m super excited to explore the rest of the city and try out all the great food. Let’s see how long I can go without getting an upset stomach, haha.

As corny as it may sound, I truly believe that this is the start of a new beginning for me. If I see the things I expect to here in Karnatake, this will be an invaluable experience for me that will sit with me forever. Moreover, it may well promise a whole new chapter of my life in South Asia.