When I was innocently asked a few months ago if I would bring football kit to Uganda, I willingly agreed. I had been to visit the Batwa (pygmies) in Bwindi in March and was very taken by their story and plight. This tribe of indigenous people who were mainly hunter gatherers had been removed abruptly from the Impenetrable Forest as a result of government led conservation efforts and to protect the biodiversity and gorillas in the
area. From what they told us, there was no plan to manage their removal- they had no homes, no land and they had to leave behind all their traditional ways of living. After several years of living on the streets and facing extreme poverty, the government stepped in and provided lands close to the Forest, but on the condition that they would never enter the Forest again.
You can't fix everything on a give back holiday but bringing a bit of joy can be wondrous and so I agreed. And so the problems started. I live in Northern Ireland and the football kit lived in England. No problem looking at it from Bwindi but slightly more of an issue from Belfast. This started my association with Kit Aid; a charity set up to send used football kits to Africa. Getting the kits anywhere was proving to be a problem!
Eventually after many false starts I paid to have them posted to me and re-packed them for the journey. I was really impressed with the time and effort that Kit Aid puts in to providing very good quality, clean and sometimes brand new football gear for their donees. My own knowledge of football or soccer is very much limited to 3 seasons on Ted Lasso and the ability to switch off the radio on a Saturday when I hear the sport commentators. But it looked really amazing to my eyes.
So I had the gear and assumed I was heading to the part of Bwindi we visited in March, a short walk down a rocky path. I just needed a driver to take us to the trading post. It was then I realised things were not going to be that simple. My phone was taken, examined and many African men and women started gesticulating, shouting and looking at me as if I was deranged. The fact that I probably am is beside the point.
I was told that where I wanted to go was 'very very far'. No problem, I would pay the 200 dollars to get us there. But I could not go alone. So we set off as a group of 4 women, 1 child and 3 men in a pretty crowded jeep. I should add it was Sunday so the ladies all had their Sunday shoes on and my friend Anita was in flip flops.
The car journey was genuinely terrifying. Rockslides, potholes, missing bits of road and the overall African massage experience as we drove for 90 minutes to the area of Nkuringo. It felt great, we had arrived. But we hadn't. We kept going through an even worse set of 'roads' finally arriving at what people here call the end of the earth. And accurately so.
The Batwa community leaders were there to greet us and we all shook hands and were delighted to see us. I handed over the suitcase and was ready to head back to the jeep when I realised we were not finished. We had to visit the community and it was a privilege to be invited to do so. It's only 300 metres up that hill, we were told. Now I still work in feet and inches, so my rapid calculation told me we were good to go. I find this next bit hard to describe but can I just say that tracking gorillas was almost easier than our climb up that mountain. The suitcase was on someone's head, the child was slung over someone's shoulders and the Sunday church shoes would never look the same again. I still don't know what 300 metres is but I suspect this was a lot more, on a narrow path and up an almost vertical mountain.
But at last we arrived and the ceremony of delivering the kit started. I'm not really one for the limelight but as the honoured guest I had to give each man or child his shirt. They were really excited as I called out the name of the player on the back of each shirt and gave it to them which immediately was put on and paraded. We took pictures but nothing will ever fully capture the sheer excitement and delight of the team in receiving their kit. And some of the player names were very familiar leads to whoops and shouts of joy.
After that we were treated to traditional Batwa dancing- a real joy to behold. Pictures just don't do any of this justice- there we were at the end of the earth, high on top a mountain in the jungles of Bwindi like the last people left alive, nothing for miles around but jungle and the sounds of birds and Batwa.
So that was the delivery of the Aston Villa football shirts, shorts and socks to the Batwa Pygmies of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. They don't have boots, but I did bring a football. Maybe next time? And there will be a next time, they've already made another application to Kit Aid. I just need to catch breath.
