When Ardy told me the school for this week was in Bekasi, I knew it was relatively far. When Manoah and I hopped in the taxi, however, I didn't fully comprehend the 2 hour journey we were in for.
As the journey dragged on, we started talking about how it was a waste of time to come so far because they're never going to be able to come out to the field we've rented, we're never going to have time to come back, we don't have enough discs to give them any, we need to pick our investments of time, and so on and so on. By the time we reached Sekolah Jaya Sutia Abadi, we were hot, cranky, covered in road dust (due to the 2 traffic jams we had to get out of our taxi, and then bus and walk past) and in no mood to run a school visit.
As soon as we met the students, everything changed. I had always assumed that the further out of Jakarta you got, the worse their English was, but in fact we were able to run almost the entire class in (slow) English. The students were attentive, and seemed genuinely excited about the possibility of teaching this new game to their friends.
At every other school we have visited we have had to physically drag the kids on to the ashphalt and push them into two lines to start teaching them to throw but. before I knew it, both boys and girls were out there throwing backhands and flicks like a bunch of pros.
The game was good fun with only minimal refereeing required and the kids seemed to have a great time. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Manoah's team was utterly decimated.
Up until this school visit, we had never really expected that the schools could be expected to develop as little islands of ultimate in their own right, but somehow this school seemed different. We ended up leaving two discs with them, and had a long discussion with the sport teacher, principal, vice principal and a few other teachers about the role we see them playing in the future development of ultimate in Indonesia.
We told them to keep in touch via email and via the comments on this website, and if they are making good progress we'll go back. Exciting stuff, we'll see how it turns out...
Another interesting development is the extra interest that Soleh has been showing in the past few weeks. He came along on this school visit, and it sounds like he'll be coming on a few more.
For more photos, see below:
Photos: Soleh and John
Labels: School visits
