The Tournaments

It’s high time now that I took a crack at explaining my most time consuming endeavor to date, organizing a summer vacation basketball and soccer tournament for the kids here in Arivonimamo.  I’m an Economic Development Volunteer and our youth sports tournaments are a far cry from ‘economic development’ in any form, except maybe for the lone yogurt vendor who wised up and found a new market selling to our spectators.  Still, there were occasions I felt I was wasting valuable time running around to make this thing happen when instead of focusing on my primary projects.  Yet, as I’ve gotten some distance from the tournaments I’ve come to realize that at the time, it really was the best use of my energies. 

Starting shortly after my early May ‘installation’ in Arivonimamo I began popping around to the different coffee / fried bread stands trying to meet the new neighbors and get the lay of the land.  One of those stands, the one directly across the street from my house, belonged to a guy named Rija, and as it turns out he ended up being one of the most enthusiastic proponents of my community integration.  He has roughly 10 years on me but you’d never know it by the way he acts so we became fast friends.  Aside from taking it upon himself to explain to me all things Malagasy, he also volunteers teaching scout groups and, more importantly, he’s a member of the delegation that helps to coordinate sports for Arivonimamo.  Naturally our conversations drifted towards sports, and some afternoon in mid-June, with the summer vacation fast approaching, I got around to asking what these hoards of students get up to during the summer vacation?  ‘To be honest, nothing,’ was the answer I got.  About half of them return home to their rural communes, having only lived in Arivonimamo during the school year because it’s a major regional education hub.  The other half list around town, and often times that involves drinking and smoking, which both Rija and I concluded was not the most constructive use of their time.  ‘Well, why don’t we organize a tournament for the kids?’ I suggested.  Rija was on board and thus began a series of afternoons spent sitting at his shop, diagramming out exactly what we hoped to accomplish.

After some deliberation we had outlined two separate tournaments to take place in September.  School ends around June and starts back up again in October so the tournaments didn’t span the length of the summer break.  We had to settle for September as it would have been logistically impossible to get anything together before then.  We bracketed the ages that could take part, 14-17, and decided to have a basketball tournament for the girls and a soccer tournament for the guys.  Why we decided to demarcate the genders as such? I have no idea.  To be frank that decision was made very early on by Rija when I still lacked the language capacity to get into the reasoning of it.  Moreover I was pretty transfixed by my goal that this not be my project alone but that this be steered by interested parties in Arivonimamo.  So the reigns were passed on decisions such as that. 

The next big step was getting the space secured and letting the town know what we were up to so the teams could come together.  Up the road a stretch from my house there is a sizable private Catholic high school that serves a substantial portion of the students here in Arivonimamo.   They also happen to have a massive soccer field.  So Rija and I started there, and after three or four successive trips to the head master’s main office, we finally found him in.  He was unequivocally enthusiastic about the venture and offered not only the use of the field but tables, chairs, nets, corner flags, the whole lot.  In our efforts to secure the basketball court we considered using the space in from of city hall but decided the space was often overrun by young hooligans whose shenanigans would likely get in the way of our games.  So we decided upon Johnson high school, slightly further up the road, no more than a hundred yards from the Prosperer office. 

This next part I’m not particularly proud of but I’ll be honest about it because it’s a tale of caution to all those still green volunteers who have yet to cut their teeth on their town.  During tournament prep negotiations with Rija, and this was very early on mind you, he suggested we include some ‘fanomezana’ or awards, for the winning teams, ‘you know, to motivate the kids.’  This was during my ‘sheep’ phase, i.e. I was blindly following and deferring to greater wisdom.  So what did he have in mind?  Well, maybe a trophy, jerseys and a ball for the winning team, and just jerseys and a ball for second place. Ok, sure.  Agreeing to that ended up causing the biggest job induced headache I’ve had to date, but I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time so I went ahead, printed up flyers, notified the important officials and painted the town with posters advertising this new summer vacation tournament.  I also had a chance to get on the radio to tell the town about it and by the time our informational meeting for all the interested parties rolled around we had over 100 kids signed up.

At this point the division of responsibilities started to shift and Rija took the lead on mining his connections to secure referees and draft game schedules.  That was the point at which the other shoe dropped and I realized I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was going to get all the prizes we’d promised.  I’d been bumbling around in a haze trying to get a handle on the pace of life here and figure out my role so much so that I’d stumbled my way right into a pretty nasty predicament.  So I racked my brain and all of a sudden it hit me that Friends of Madagascar, an organization that was briefly mentioned during our training, had jerseys and balls for individuals trying to develop youth sports in communities throughout Madagascar.  Better yet, the previous volunteer whom I replaced here in Arivonimamo now lives in the capital and is responsible for the Friends of Madagascar’s stock room.  After some quick emails back and forth I drafted a formal request and was able to get my hands on jerseys and one soccer ball.  Funny enough, there were supposed to be two soccer balls but one turned out to be a handball when it finally arrived, according to Rija’s expert opinion.  That still left me with two trophies, another soccer ball and two basketballs to procure. 

In Madagascar, any time you interface with the ‘lehibe’ or important figures in town, there’s a specific formula to follow.  Rija sat with me as we drafted formal requests for the Mayor of my town, the head of my district, the head of the entire region, the head of the delegation of sport here in Arivonimamo, and the head of the delegation of sport for the whole region of Itasy.  Funny story about that last one.  I got a hold of her one day by phone and scheduled a time when I could get an hour West via taxi brousse to meet with her and explain my request.  She was remarkably receptive throughout the whole meeting and inside I was celebrating because I was certain I’d sold her on it and would get the money I needed to buy the final prizes.  At the end she looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘I’d love to help you, but the government doesn’t give us any money.  We don’t even have an office…. But I can put my stamp on your other requests to make them seem more official.’ Great.

In the end I have to thank the head of my district who came through to provide trophies, the Mayor of Arivonimamo who got on board by giving us a soccer ball and a French volunteer living in Ampefy who had two basketballs she was willing to part with.  All threads finally tied together the last week of August, just before start of the tournaments so even though it all worked out, I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off up until the very last moment.

The other sticking point was our basketball refs.  Turns out, though Rija knew just about everyone who was anyone related to soccer in Arivonimamo, he wasn’t all that well connected when it came to basketball. Fortunately it’s a sport that Americans tend to excel at, myself not included however.  So I put out an all-points bulletin to volunteers in the area and my fellow region mates, Anders, Emma, and Sarah stepped up to the plate and to fill the gap. 

Game time finally arrived.  We had three teams for the basketball tournament, so we decided to do it all in one weekend which was incredibly convenient for my fellow volunteers.  While most volunteers are taller than their characteristically short Malagasy counterparts, I doubt that many experience Gulliver’s travelers syndrome quite as acutely as Andres (I’m making that syndrome up by the way, but you get the point).  He towers well over six feet which puts him a couple heads above your average Malagasy, and he has a deep baritone clarity to his voice that commands authority.  Naturally we stuck him as our center ref.  Games went well, people had fun, we had hoards of spectators and everything looked as if it would go off without a hitch…until we tried to have a guy’s match just for fun before our girls final.  The game devolved quickly into physical fighting despite our refs best efforts and I got my first glimpse of how conflict is often handled in this country.  Players, coaches, fans, everyone rushed onto the court and started arguing, with Rija and a few others stepping in to restore order.  One of the adult coaches even began confiscating the nets he had lent to us as a punishment to the teams until we talked him out of it.  The most surprising part for me was that, even though fights are not uncommon at sporting events in the States, this altercation had a more ominous quality to it.  Discussions quickly disintegrated into a lament about the general mindset of Malagasy people in Arivonimamo whenever some sort of competition is introduced.  This was not my discussion mind you, but a general existential examination of culture played out in a shouting match between the Malagasy participants. 

Things settled down, we shook hands, made up, and began preparing for the final.  All began well and this time we had a great deal of spectators from town piled along the stone wall, eager to watch. By the end of the third period the score was tied and heading into the fourth we were determined to keep the play fair.  We were still gun shy though from earlier in the afternoon, all expecting a flare up of some sort.  Part way through the fourth period one of the girls threw an overly aggressive pick that spun her opponent to the ground, twisting her ankle in the process.  That was the spark our little power keg was begging for and things went south once again.  The team members whose player was injured were so incensed that they decided to forfeit.  I was shocked by the decision.  In the end we awarded the prizes and the four of us volunteers retired to my house to decompress and take stock of what the lack of perseverance and hair trigger tempers we’d just seen might indicate about the culture we were steadily assimilating.

As for soccer, we had thirteen games total.  Actually fourteen if you count the one we had to reschedule halfway through because it disintegrated into a brawl.  Yet, despite the single flare up, all the soccer games actually went remarkably smoothly.  The most heartening aspect of the whole thing was that older organized soccer teams here in Arivonimamo took younger players under their wings by helping organize teams.  There are already semi-established clubs for guys over the age of 18 in my town, but my goal was to create something for the younger crowd.  I figured it would be loose conglomerates of friends that would scrape themselves into teams, but to my surprise the older clubs let the younger kids use their jerseys; players even came along to help coach their little protégés.  Malagasy people have often told me that their national soccer team is rotten but I can say with confidence that this next generation of talent looks pretty good.  So there may be brighter days ahead on the world sporting stage.  When the final game arrived at the end of September, Arivonimamo was gearing up to get back into school, so the timing worked out nearly perfectly.  We had close to 300 people watching that final day, I got to give my little speech to all the players, I awarded the trophies and treated the refs to a cake bought from Rija’s fund-raiser to support the Boy Scouts in Madagascar. 

I know bit off far more than I was able to chew that early on in my service, but for all the ups and downs, and stops and starts of the whole thing, it was the trial and error that taught me how to work and live in Madagascar.  Not to mention it seriously helped my image in the community.  I learned more about the power-brokers in my area, how to get things done, and kids have been coming up to me non-stop ever since asking when the next time might be that I could put together another tournament.  Even more encouraging, I’ve had adults coming out of the woodwork who tell me they feel inspired and want to help in the development of youth sports for our community.  I’ll have another couple of these things going in the future without a doubt.  The one thing that worries me a bit is the fatalism and angst that I saw boiling beneath the surface of this culture whenever a fight erupted in one of the games.  The startling propensity to auto-attribute minor altercations to a fundamental flaw in Malagasy mindset was both startling and alarming to observe.  Disagreements, when they did emerge, degenerated and spiraled out of control with a ferocity you don’t see in your average sport related fight state-side.  It was hard to get a straight answer when I analyzed the confrontations after the fact with Malagasy friends because they were all so self-deprecating.  If what I’m told is true, and there really is a cultural inclination towards fatalism, risk-aversion, and a general dearth of trust that impedes compromise and perseverance, then that seems like something I should try to work on.  Especially since those attitudes inherently suppress economic development. I figure if I can get these kids playing team sports and adhering to the rules, then that’s as good a way to teach a life lesson as any.

Until next time, Veloma