Now, with Murchison full in our bellies, we take the game drive road out towards Arua, again farther north. Christ School’s football team has already begun their competitions at the National level at the Coca Cola sponsored tournament. This year the matches are held in Arua, which turns out to be a good-sized city, thriving on its’ strategic location close to Southern Sudan and Western Congo and the aid developing both. The language here defeats us but we are relieved to find that even non-native Africans have trouble “picking” any of it. One of the staggering realities of Ugandan life, the inability to understand your fellow countryman, living mere kilometers away.

We stay at a nice hotel catering to the buzungu palate with brick oven pizza and an amazingly clear and clean swimming pool. Dinner there with our CSB staff coaches and a visit to Master A and his wife Emily’s home (they are natives to Arua; though he is working and living with us in Bundibugyo) were highlights of our time, along with seeing the scrappy CSB team in action for two of their seven match games.

Sadly, Christ School lost both matches that we watched . . . . Most likely to “professional cheating” as I like to refer to the more accomplished and developed ways of fooling rules and regulations. Bundibugyans are smaller (nourishment and genetics) than many others in the country but the large height disparity was likely also due to the involvement of non-students, men in their mid to late twenties, on some of the other teams.
No matter, our students played beautifully the first day and spiritedly if a little more tiredly, the second. Clearly we’re not yet the best in the country, at any rate, and no doubt lose matches due not only to cheating but to the quality of our play, but at this point CSB is still in the running for the second round of competition with two losses, two draws and one win - our best performance in CSB history. And better yet, we come away proud of our coaches, strong African men coaching in English, resting injured players and struggling to see that their team are not only good footballers but good students and people as well. It’s not about whether you win or lose but how and for who you live your life. We see them making some good choices.