Watte Ranen Fani (A Big Day of Volleyball)

Last Saturday, I had an epic day of volleyball. My friend Paul and I organized a volleyball tournament between our two schools. The 5^th-8^th graders from our classes were scheduled to compete in a friendly tournament to showcase some school pride. My students gathered at our school building early in the morning and we began the hour-long walk to the neighboring village of Sapeta. It was like a school field trip, except with the lack of yellow busses, brown bag lunches, overprotective parents and crazy bus drivers.

            We did a short opening ceremony and had each of the students introduce themselves to the other school. Then we put together some teams mixed with boys and girls and began the games. The outcome of the volleyball competition was on the verge of embarrassing. We played 4 rounds of best of 3 series’ with different teams. My students from UFO easily won every single game and came away with a dominating victory. I was actually secretly rooting for the other school at one point, just because I felt so guilty that we were pummeling them so badly. The other students pouted and my kids celebrated, but in the end everyone seemed to have a good time.

            I walked back with all my boy students and we had a fun time messing around on the jungle pathway. As we were coming closer to our village, a girl hurriedly warned me that I was late for my volleyball game. On this same day, a volleyball tournament was beginning with the youth of UFO. I had been placed on the A team and our game time had been switched to this very afternoon. So I stopped by my house and grabbed a drink of water and a snack before heading down to Fongen to play the game. I arrived just in time and our team smashed our opponents. I am a head shorter than all my teammates, but I am scrappy enough to hold my own on the court.

            After our game, we went back to our village of Unnuno and started our standard afternoon volleyball mayhem. I played for another couple of hours until all the volleyballness was sucked out of me. It was a fun day of triple location volleyballing and gave me the rare sensation of actually being physically exhausted at the end of the day.