Sports day!

Francine Egberts, occupational therapist

Organizing a sports day for a hundred children is no simple matter. Our first sports day was planned to take place just before the end of my stay in Léon and for the opportunity to provide a carefree day for the city's street children was the crown of my work. The first step was to discuss with the team in Léon what activities to plan. Our ideas on sports and games differed greatly and it took two more meetings before my concept of mixed teams, no red cards and a big trophy for the winning team finally got the go ahead. Fortunately, not everyone was sceptical, although some, like Mentor Jairo, were. A fanatic soccer player himself, he was convinced the boys would simply push the girls to the ground and in the end showed up armed with a red card to punish bad fouls.

Barefoot is best

The day arrived and even before the games started, the most fanatic of the children had asked for a ball and were showing off their tricks to their friends. I realised that one of the boys, Marco, was barefoot!. When I asked him why he was not wearing his shoes, he replied that he could run faster without them and went off see which team he would play in. He came back happy and shouted to his cousin Juan: "We are playing against each other in our first game. That'll be exciting!",

Boys, boys, boys

The teams were being coached by a number of willing parents. The red team was going strong. Marco was goalkeeper and kept his team moving in the right direction. He stayed in goal; there were enough good forward players to outplay the opponent and so there was no need to move forward. In the end, even though the boys tended to dominate the game, the girls prevented the boys from gaining possession of the ball. Although Jairo did hand out some cards, it was luckily not because the boys were knocking the girls over.

All for a ball

Competition was fierce partly due to the fact that the prize was a ball. Nothing makes children happier than a ball. Unfortunately, there can only be one winning team and on this occasion the the red team were the lucky ones. After the tournament, I saw Alvaro sitting all by himself in a corner. When I asked him why he was sad, he said: "I should have been in the red team; the teams were divided unfairly and now I do not have a ball". A tear trickled down his cheek. To comfort him I promised that next sports day the prize would also be a ball so he had to make sure he stayed in shape.

During the six months Francine Egberts was in Nicaragua for MPP she did a lot of work and in addition to making a promotional movie, coordinated the vacation programme and developed an activity schedule. Sports day was a very successful ending.

After returning to the Netherlands, Francine started as a research student of development aid at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. For the last two years she has been working abroad; after some years in Thailand, Francine now works in Mongolia.