Devon Cricket Board - Cricket Without Boundary's

To everyone who supported me,

I got back to Devon from Cameroon a week ago. After three weeks of blissful good health, the journey back was a little gruesome. I will spare the grisly details but suffice to say I spent a majority of the twelve hour flight somewhere other than my seat. But now, much recovered, it is time to give you all a short account of the trip and to thank you for your support. The full story is of course longer and more colourful, better told at leisure and over a fireside pint or two, but I hope this will give you a flavour. Together, you raised the splendid sum of £1,889 and 37 pence and I want you all to know how this contributed towards the success of this venture.

My team was unusual, in that there were five of us and I was the only bloke. Lady Tracey, CWB veteran, from Ickenham was the other cricket coach. Two other team members, mad Becky and super-efficient Anouck, were French speakers and were to prove vital. Our fifth member, Jo, is the Country Manager and conducting a PhD on sport and development in the country. Our mighty team personified Cricket Without Boundaries, nobody excluded, in a culture where women are often second-class citizens. Cameroon is soccer-mad but has a national team and a cricket association (FECACRICKET). We were helped by several of their young coaches over the two weeks, all members of the Indomitable Lions when they take on Mali, Rwanda, Ghana, Morocco, the Seychelles and St Helena, good players, full of energy, perfect role models. Notable among them was Winston Ndum (alias Kallis), 23 year old CWB cricket ambassador, cool as 007 and a smart mover at the ABC dancing, of which more below.

Cameroon assaulted the senses from the very start; hot, green, humid, a madcap reel of sights and sounds. Road-sides lined with myriad items for sale, roads packed with battered yellow taxis and over-loaded motor-bike taxis weaving between potholes; colourfully dressed men, women and children carrying food and other goods on their heads. Unusual smells. The capital, Yaounde built like Rome on seven hills, is a jumbled mix of avant-garde concrete architecture and wooden shacks covered in iron roofs; chickens and goats wandered past the Hilton hotel.

The project spent one week in the capital and a second in the cooler south-western hill station of Buea, surrounded by tea plantations at the base of an active volcano, Mount Cameroon. In each location, we started the week training the teachers at the schools which we then visited during the subsequent days. There were three or four school visits each day, never quite knowing what to expect at each. Sometimes we had 80 kids, at another 200; ages seven to seventeen in the same school. Playing areas fields of dry red dust and stone, carved from school yards or perched between houses and banana trees. By the end, we would be joined by dozens of passers-by, all taking part if possible. Instant mayhem, then home in the late afternoon, for Strepsils, Guinness, some food and an early night beneath the mosquito nets.

Catching with James, Yaounde

Our goal was to use the cricket coaching as our means to get across the HIV/AIDS health messages, using the ABC and T mnemonic. Cricket drills were basic, all-action and fun, using the kit bags we had brought with us, up to 30 kids per group, bowling at stumps, batting off cones and catching. In each we told them about Abstaining (from bending your arm when bowling), Being Faithful to your partner (by giving them nice throws to catch) and Condom (much hilarity even at the Catholic schools, to protect themselves, standing back when the ball is being hit) and then the Test, games to know our status and to see who is best. Chanting and dancing between stations, riotous laughter at the large, sweating white man trying to find the local rhythm. Every session was closed with frantic Rapid Fire and Cross Fire games and even more mass dancing. Meanwhile the unshakeable Becky interviewed kids about their own awareness and attitudes to HIV/AIDS, a pretty graphic exercise among the hormonal 16 year old inner-city boys . Did I mention that I coached in French?

The schools and the kids really have very little. I was moved at one school when a small kid gave me a single pink football boot to look after, afraid that the other kids would steal it. One boot for the foot he kicked with. At the two orphanages we visited, we handed out tennis balls (which we otherwise guarded diligently), each treated like a precious green diamond. The teachers looked tired, paid just £30 per month; even in Cameroon, that is not going to go far. The teachers at many of the schools were remarkable, embracing our crazy plan to demo cricket, welcoming us warmly and willing to have a go themselves. In Buea, the wonderful Miss Chebby taught sports at a run-down school on the far out-skirts of town, leading our minibus down a dirt track on her red moped, a young single woman, far from her home and discouraged by her parents and family, teaching classes of poor kids in a neighbourhood renowned for high levels of teenage pregnancy.

We ended each week with a Festival where the schools came together to play each other. In Yaounde, a tiny team in neat yellow football shirts and shorts ran rings round the older kids and won. Victor, el Presidente of FECA cricket presented each school with a bat and ten balls. We were interviewed for the sports spot on national television and appeared in the French and English-language newspapers.

You will indulge me the extra week I spent in Cameroon of which the briefest of details; a trip in a dug-out canoe on a mysterious crater lake near Kumba, the idyllic Bird Watcher’s Club by the sea at Limbe, gorillas, chimps, fried fish and beer, a Botanic Garden, soldier ants and a humbling trip through the jungle to a ruined slave port; the German Seaman’s Mission in the heaving, sultry port of Douala, the armpit of Africa; packed bush taxis, minibuses, precarious motorbike taxis and a train to Yaounde; ending with a fraught double encounter with a police road block, teenagers with Armalites, bribery and a beer-drinking session in a petrol station. Cameroon is never dull.

Exhausting, exhilarating, carried along by waves of smiles, surrounded and overwhelmed by crowds of excited kids, young now beyond my years and deliriously happy. It is not a revelation that kids are the much the same, whether in a Devon sports hall or on a rough field in Cameroon. Full of energy, curiosity, showing off, desperate to win, eager to learn, ready to laugh. Every child anywhere deserves a chance (many chances) to grow up healthy, among friends and family and to be happy. But we all know too that not every child has that equal chance, simply by the accident of birth. I want to thank all of you for supporting something that may just, in its own small way, help to even up those chances and make a difference to all our lives. If a large, sweating white man in a voluminous blue shirt, dancing awkwardly, falling over a pile of bags, spouting bad French, reminds them to make the right choices when they are older, I for one will feel we have achieved something together.

Farewell to the team, Buea

David Gidney, Devon, November 2015