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Presenting football shirts
Posted by: Tom Luke on 18 February 2008
Saturday off, so we spent the day in Bloemfontein shopping, drinking and eating, which is highly recommended with English wages and South African prices! Having a huge steak with a couple of drinks, for a combined total of 40 ponds for five is wonderful.
Sunday we went to one of the Township churches. A simple tin shack with a bare earth floor partly covered with a worn carpet and old wooden seats that splintered your rear if you shuffled about, yet the atmosphere was fantastic.
The singing and dancing was totally inspiring, both from the children and the ladies of the church. At home, the children in my church just sit quiet, looking bored out of their minds, whilst the ladies are mostly at an age where dancing is a physical impossibility, but here they were so full of life it was infectious.
In the afternoon we were back at Lebone handing out the football shirts we had been donated. To see the looks on the faces of all the boys as they were presented with their very own football shirt was something that will stay with us for ever. Even the boy who ended up with a Newcastle United shirt seemed pleased, though this shows just how desperate life is out here! But what was really touching was that after the shirts had been handed out, some of the older boys came across to us and personally thanked us for their shirts, and this made it all worth while.
We also presented them with a full set of strips donated by the cubs at my church, and they proudly posed for a team photo, looking for all the world like any typical group of kids back home. Afterwards we watched them all playing a game of football, barefooted with an old punctured ball, yet the skills of some of them were amazing to watch.
