Next School Visit

For those who might like to come along, we'll be visiting SMP Harapan I this Saturday the 2nd at 10am at the below address:
     SMP Harapan I
     Jl. Gusti Ngurah Rai
     Penggilingan - Cakung 13940
     Jakarta Timur

The school visits are good fun and a good way to give some local kids some meaningful cross-cultural interaction past yelling "Hello Mister!" at the nearest white person walking past. Maybe after a few thousand more of these visits the novelty of having white people walking around Indonesia will wear off. Maybe...

A Field!

Ladies and gentlemen,

We have a field.

The field itself is Lapangan Prumnas Klender in East Jakarta, and we have it for 4 hours on a Sunday afternoon from 2pm until 6pm for Rp. 150,000 (Not Rp. 100,000 for 2 hours as I said on the video...).

The timing is a little unfortunate as it overlaps with Discindo training, but it was the only timeslot we were able to find on a field in Jakarta on a Sunday. We could find slots on Saturday but, unfortunately, most kids actually have school on Saturdays and encouraging them to skip school is exactly what we don't want to do. The location is much better for them as well.

The field itself has pretty bad grass coverage, but it is pretty spacious and has a cool set of stands for spectators for future tournaments.

So if you want to come along drop me a line on +62816 138 1077 or just turn up this Sunday the 3rd of December if you know where it is.

Extra: Here's the field on wikimapia.

Sekolah Al-Karomiah

Last Saturday the 26th of November, Ardy and I visited Sekolah Al-Karomiah in Jatinegara, East Jakarta to introduce the students to ultimate, and invite them along to next week's kick-off pick-up game at Lapangan Prumnas Klender.

The students responded well, and in an intra-class game Team Bukan Scorpion overcame their worthy rivals Team Scorpion 5-4.

See below for some more photos of the day.

What's Going On?

Some of you may be wondering what has been going on with KFJ since the tournament. And fair enough, it was in August...

Well, while there has been all sorts of administrative stuff going on (the details of which I won't bore you with until we have completed them) the fasting month of Lebaran put a bit of a hole in our actual disc playing a clinic-running, but we're back up now.

From now on, every Saturday morning we will be running a clinic or two at different schools around Jakarta (last week was only one school because making it to the first one meant I would have had to get out of bed at 6am). For photos of our trip to Sekolah Al-Karomiah last week, see the next post which will follow shortly.

So exciting that I can't believe I waited until the fourth paragraph to write about it is the fact that we now have a field! It's, um, a little far for those of us who live in South Jakarta, but it's perfect for the kids. For more info, see the post about the fields which will follow the post about Al-Karomiah shortly.

Proof!

We're famous

Hey hey!

We had our first *real* publicity on Monday morning with over half a page devoted to covering the Poncol Cup in that fine Jakarta broadsheet, the Jakarta Post (with a circulation of around 40,000!). Unfortunately none of the kids speak English well enough to understand the article (we're working on that though) but they're pretty stoked about the pictures.

One drawback of getting so much space in a paper is that it can't actually fit in a scanner so that I can put it up here to brag about it. I'll get my camera back of Ardy soon and we'll get it up here in some form or another.

In the meantime, you'll have to settle for this.*

*Despite having a circulation of around 40,000, for some reason the Jakarta Post doesn't host articles on its main pages for more than a day, so permalinks there would be a waste of time...

Priority 1: Discs

Ultimate fever has swept through Poncol (a small neighbourhood in Kampung Melayu, East Jakarta) but we want to expand. Would we like a field of our own? Hell yeah... But before we get that, we actually need to get the equipment.

Ultimate is often promoted as an egalitarian sport because all you need to play is a disc, a place to run around, and some people. Unfortunately for those of us who live in places like Indonesia though, discs that you can actually play ultimate with are a little hard to come by.

There is no real limit to the number of discs we need, the more we get, the more we can expand. The hardest working man in Indonesian ultimate, Ardy Ferdianto, has a huge network of schoolteachers from his time as a school drama teacher so the plan is to run a series of clinics for sports teachers throughout Jakarta and to give them all a disc. They can train the kids during PE class, and once we get a field, interested kids can come and play pick-up every Sunday morning at a central location (yet to be finally decided). The development of each school's ultimate program will be overseen by Ardy.

Fortunately for us, the World Ultimate Club Championships are coming up next week. So if you're going to Perth and you've got a disc you don't need anymore, don't just let it gather dust, send it our way. How will you send it our way you ask?

Give it to the man with the very large head:

His name is Boom and he plays for Force Durian Gamelan Orchestra.

Thanks, and good luck to everyone going to Worlds!