August 3, 2011
When you are a teacher in the Peace Corps, summer means you morph from teacher to camp counselor. You pack a gym bag and disappear for weeks at a time, shipping yourself across the country in trains, taxis, and stuffy busses.
I've always been a little hesitant about showing up to take care of complete strangers with no tricks up my sleeve. Thus, I've made a habit of turning that gym bag into a Mary Poppins bag. It comes complete with a deck of cards, crayons, and a few homemade paper activities that will fit in a folder and give me an extra couple hours of security during child care.
Going to my mountain camp, this bag-o-fun proved pretty useless. The first morning, the English lesson was all about baseball. Somehow cards and crayons didn't do justice to America's Favorite Pastime. I did what I could to amuse them before we dismissed for lunch.
Later in the day, I stepped out of my room only to see a handful of 8th graders standing in the field. "Come on Anne, we're gonna play baseball!" In my head I was thinking, "Well that's interesting. We don't have a baseball. Or a bat. As the matter of fact, all we have is a Frisbee." Clearly, I underestimate Kazakh resourcefulness.
In the heat of the day, we converted a grove of trees into bases. The Frisbee turned into a strange breed of baseball bat. And wouldn't you know it, our native Kazakh apples became baseballs. It wasn't exactly Busch Stadium, but even Stan the Man had to start somewhere.
Who knows, maybe my lack of bat inspired a few more kids to take interest in the next sporting wave to sweeps the nation!
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