By Peter
With reference to chapter one of The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s, I write another post for the Kenya Field of Dreams Blog. Yesterday, Saturday the third of July in preparation for American Independence Day, we showed the recorded game of Brazil against the Netherlands. I have to say I am not really a fan of the Netherlands football strip, I think it is to do with the font, the six looks like a nine when the player is upside down after a particularly over the top foul. But in a way, I am glad that the Netherlands went through to the next round since we are working for a certain Dutch lady, Cocky van Dam, (pronounced Co-kee), for Moving the Goalposts.
So back to the rural school setting for the showing, without any electricity and potentially running water, it was great to show the game and curiously even better to see the stars, the Milky Way, the Southern Cross without the moon obliterating the starscape. No camera could do justice to this scene. So I didn’t attempt it.
Moving the Goalposts and Kenya Field of Dreams are getting more and more coverage as the month gets longer, a previous post mentioned the piece on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4. In our hotel, one of party (Alex Goodey) got talking to a lady from Wiltshire who had learned about Moving the Goalposts from Woman’s Hour several months earlier. Yesterday morning, a piece went out on Radio 4’s documentary series, From Our Own Correspondent that describes the whole process of the screenings from the initial arrival to the final wheel spin over the compacted earthen road as we leave. The screen and electrical equipment were kindly donated by Google and the girls were given a great deal of help from Stuart Farmer from Open Air Cinema.
On Friday, I got promoted from classroom assistant to shared teaching responsibilities with Andy Marsh (from KPMG), our resident accountant in plain clothes, and we were asked to enthuse the children and get them to do a short play based on a journey. This is similar to asking an English Year 8 group to write a play in French. After some cajoling, the pupils excelled to the challenge and we ended up filming them on Flip Cameras (also generously donated by a kind benefactor to the project). They laughed so much when they saw themselves on the screen from the computer.
So as I leave the township of Kilifi, Moving the Goalposts and Kenya Field of Dreams project, I am brought to mind of the many heroisms that are present in this wonderful corner of Kenya. There are the muzungus, Sarah and Cocky, who have run the Moving the Goalposts project; the Moving the Goalposts girls who have to master the English language which they do so lyrically; Kahindi, James and the other Minibus, Matatu and Tuck-Tuck drivers who drive over such changeable surface conditions; the girls we have all taught and coped with our varying accents; the tailor who made some shirts for me and didn’t make them look like a marquee; the various Kenya Field of Dreams volunteers from Google, the BBC and the interlopers of which I was one who added to the rich tapestry of life and finally to Harshad who came up with the original idea to send us out here. I hope that this project reaches greater heights like an eagle that floats on the thermals over the African plains, that it continues to spread its message like a coral reef spreads over the shallow sea floors and inspire many people like water from a waterfall nourishes many lives.
Kenya Field Of Dreams 