Rainy days are good days in Sidi Moumen

Why? Well, the boys stay away and the girls come to play. Like I mentioned before, every Sunday I go to the Sidi Moumen Youth Culture Center where I run their sports program. The center is located in one of Morocco's biggest sprawling slums/low income neighborhood, infamous for being the home to many of Morocco's suicide bombers. We offer kids Lacrosse, field hockey, basketball and football. Today, the normal 150 kids did now show up because of heavy rains in the morning. On my way in bus number 17 (as Lisa and I read aloud to each other an old Harper's magazine article on the state of education in America and old men kept saying hello to Lisa because she has become something of a regular on this particular bus) I wondered if we would find any kids at the center today. They tend to stay away when the weather gets bad.

We arrive today and surprisingly I find all the girls who come to play football inside, waiting and about a handful of boys who probably just followed their sisters. It made me realize how far they have come from when we first started, half interested in football, not taking anything seriously, sometimes coming and other times not. The attendance has been pretty steady now for three months and playing with them today, I could also see an improvement in their game. Not that this is my main goal but it is nice to see they are learning more about the game. What makes me the proudest is that they are dedicated and are starting to respect each other more and their coaches more, especially when Amal (my go to women's football coach who comes to help Sunday mornings) is there. She is this great athlete who grew up playing football and now coaches a local Sidi Moumen team and has been a part of many camps and trainings that either I held or the US embassy or the British Council. The girls really like her and she does a great job with them. They have learned to respect her as well as me. Last week, Amal couldn't come so it was just me and the girls were pretty out of control, not listening, fighting among themselves, refusing to play if another girl was on their team. Nothing I could say was doing anything and so I finally told them to go home, that football was done for the day and they could tell me why next Sunday. Today, one of the girls came up to me and apologized, recognizing that they were out of control. I can't describe how great it was to feel that. Most of the time you think they have no idea how they are acting.

Regardless, we did some great warm up drills, boys weren't in our way trying to take our balls and kick them as far away as possible into the empty lots full of used hypodermic needles and it didn't rain again until we finished and were inside.