Perhaps some of you will laugh to learn that I am now a cross country coach (of sorts). All I know is that sports is statistically one of the very best ways to keep girls’ body images strong; to keep them away from sex and eating disorders and to help them to embrace their bodies as temples given to them as gifts and under their own safekeeping.
So I joined my team mate Scotticus who just began the first cross country team at CSB. There are a lot of kids, but few girls - we hope for more in the future. Yet it is an opportunity to demonstrate to many more that sports are cool, fun and worthwhile even for a busy mom. It’s a chance with the few girls we have, to develop friendships and show love and begin to understand better the life and thoughts of African girls on campus, straddling the worlds between village life and modern life.
Mondays we run intervals, trying to improve our speeds each week. Tuesday is relay races. Wednesday, my favorite day, the kids jog up to our yard to do circuit training, running games and a devotional. Since I love relational ministry, my heart is to build this team into a real family of students. To help them really relate to each other as brothers and sisters and to look up to us as life-coaches not just sports coaches. Since we are a large boarding school there is a great need for relationships - family relationships are missing (though ever doubtful here anyway) and opposite gender relationships can easily take their place. Thursday we break for our team meeting. Friday we run off campus giving our students their much-desired chance to be out in the town and villages. Saturday Scott does fun stuff again, but at the school.
We are slowly bringing in shoes and more appropriate clothes for running. The students persevere under conditions American students would never accept; for the first month they all ran barefoot all the time, which we deemed safer than using their flip flops. Girls continue to run in long skirts or jeans with kitangi cloths wrapped around their butts and legs (deemed very sexual in this culture), and with no bras. Now we have finally accessed enough running shoes for almost all the students but we still need sports bras for the girls and long loose running shorts or capris.
We hope soon to have some races to showcase our runners in the community. We also have plans for a school wide field day, to increase appreciation for and interest in running as a sport.
For Scott, who grew up running cross country, the lack of discipline in the students is difficult to work with. But here, unlike in America, students are running because there is little else to do. I think privileged high school students in America have a myriad of choices in how to spend their free time; if they choose to run it’s because they love the sport and are willing to put in the work. But for our students here they are running rather than reading, hanging out or playing football. Those ARE their choices. Kind of puts life into perspective, especially when you consider that their choices are far better than kids who live outside the school gates.