Satisfying Sports

On Friday I had the absolute pleasure of watching our kids from Good Shepherd's Fold School compete in "ball sports" against seven other schools in the surrounding area. Junior and Senior, Boys and Girls, Netball and Soccer.
We began the day by walking with one of "our" (meaning he lives at GSF) kids to the field about a 20 minute walk away. Henry entertained me, the three interns (oh, you don't know about them yet! There are three ladies from the States here for 2 months. Lianna is a education major, Corine is a child development major, and Suzanna is studying nursing), and a family here visiting as we sauntered into Kikube town.
Sports started off with girls' junior netball-where the girls "real banged" all the other teams with scores like 8-0. It was so fun to watch them do so well! The picture above was taken right after they won a match-the girl facing you in the center hugging her friend is named Betty, and the girl on the right in the red shirt is named Beats. Both are incredibly gifted athletes, and it is always so fun to watch them compete!
Being at this sporting day was a great opportunity for me to get to know some of the kids who come to school from "out"- the surrounding villages. I usually don't get time to spend with them-as they are mostly in school while on GSF campus. Above is a picture of one of my new friends-Scovia. She even came to church on Sunday! Also in the picture is the nursing intern, Suzanna.
To top off the whole day, I even got to put into practice some nursing skills! I was busy watching the Junior boys' soccer team (pictured above) play their match, when I noticed a child behind me talking to a friend of hers. I recognized her say the Lugandan word for "nurse," so I turned around to find the older of the two girls using a broken plastic pen in an attempt to remove a jigger-a small sand flea that burrows into the skin and lays a sack of eggs. In the name of preventing tetanus, I sat down to remove the little bugger. Soon, I was swarmed by a mob of kids, all clambering and pushing to see what I was doing. It was a bit nerve wracking to have such a large audience, but we finally got the jigger out, cleaned and bandaged her foot. The rest of the day was spent practicing sports medicine-wrapping knees, placing on ice packs, and handing out Ibuprofen.

At the end of it all, we even got all the kids back safe and sound-a great way to end a very satisfying day :)