Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly sequence during which NPR’s worldwide workforce shares moments from their lives and work all over the world.
Final summer time whereas touring via Europe, I ran right into a childhood buddy who informed me a few group of grandmothers in central Kenya who had fashioned a soccer workforce to maintain match and to offer hope to a technology of youngsters. Again in Nairobi, I needed to discover out for myself, and so final month, I took a bus north to the foothills of Mount Kenya.
Miriam Wangui spent 20 years doing humanitarian work on the United Nations in Geneva, got here residence, and final yr opened a coaching middle that included a soccer academy for youngsters. What she by no means deliberate for was grandmothers — she tells me they simply arrived one Friday and mentioned they wished their very own workforce. “It was simply natural.”
At 72, Ann Wanjugu, within the middle of this photograph, is the oldest. She grins telling me she left her kitchen mid-cooking to run and register for a coaching session earlier this yr. “Earlier than, I might perform a little work and get drained,” she says. “Now there are modifications. I really feel match and I cannot cease.”
I’ve performed soccer most of my life. Watching Ann Wanjugu dash previous ladies younger sufficient to be her grandchildren, I felt one thing I hadn’t anticipated — a renewed urge to get again on the pitch myself.
On weekends the grannies mentor youngsters on the middle’s magnificence faculty, some grannies making an attempt nail polish for the primary time. No uniforms, no correct boots. Simply grandmothers and youngsters shaping one another — one dash, one chuckle, one first at a time.
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