There are few extracurricular activities that are available to my students. When families need to work daily just to survive, there is little time for students to do much besides attend school and possibly help do household chores or work on the family farm. One of the problems with assigning homework is knowing that the majority of your students really can't do this work outside of school. The family has to sacrifice a lot of helping hands to allow their child(ren) to do homework instead of house or farm work, trusting in the long run, this will likely benefit the student and their family economically.
So, if homework is too much to ask for, you can imagine that extracurricular activities like band, sports, or academic clubs are not easy to organize for students. When these activities are organized, once a year usually, the attendance is high. In November, our school competed with a nearby village's school in a soccer match. Soccer, or football which is the English term used here, is the most popular sport among adults as well. Almost every village has one small shop or restaurant that is solar powered showing their favorite teams compete - usually teams from the Premier League such as Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, and Manchester United. Students and men gather here and drink sodas and shout at the TV, the Tanzania version of Sunday afternoon football at your favorite sports bar in America.
Our school's soccer field is not too far from our house, so we heard the shouts of competition from our house when we decided to go check out the action. Jon grabbed a short video of the student's enthusiasm when our team scored. There were about 200 students from our school and 50 students from the opposing team cheering on their respective peers competing for village honor. The video below captures 25 seconds of the students rushing the soccer field and doing flips after a goal. In the end, I am pleased to say that my school won 3-1!
Video 1: students cheering after one goal
Video 2: Everyone is a cheerleader during the games. The students circle the field chanting for their team.
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