Yesterday I had the privilege of participating in a basketball tournament with the kids from Our Home. The tournament was organized for the government internauts (Ukrainian orphanages) in Makeevka. Good Shepherd Charitable Fund (the organization that Our Home belongs to) seems to have a good relationship with them, so they are also able to participate. Four of the five internauts were represented (so there were 5 teams including us). From what I understood, internauts have between 200 and 350 kids in them at all times, which is a pretty strong contrast to the 30-35 kids that live at Our Home. It was an interesting experience and I will write about some of my observations.
First of all, with such large populations, these internauts have a larger number proportionally of taller older kids. Most of our competitors’ teams were comprised of 17- and 18-year-olds. Our oldest two boys are 16 and the other kids were 14 and 15. Combined with the court being so narrow that there was only a three-point line at the top of key, this provided for some interesting basketball.
In the boys’ first game we were down 20-0 at halftime and not able to get the ball past mid-court much. Being a rather positive person, I was still impressed at halftime as I thought they had done a really good job on defense. And things only got better from there. We only lost 38-12, and most of the boys were in rather high spirits. For our second game we played the eventual champions and were able to keep it close, only trailing 15-14 at halftime and eventually losing 25-18.
The girls won their first game 20-8 on the shoulders of one of the older girls who is one of the best players (boy or girl) at Our Home. In the second game, they couldn’t get their shots to fall, and lost 8-2. That was a little sad, but all in all I thought they did a good job and could easily have been champions. They had won the championship last time, and it was unfortunate that we couldn’t bring Our Home its second athletic trophy.
The referees were an older couple and I thought they did an excellent job. They let the kids play and called the obvious calls. They had to raise their voices several times and call a couple of technical fouls, but they kept the games going and there were no fights. This was no small feat, considering the players they were dealing with. There is a stereotype in Ukraine that the only kinds of kids in internauts are thieves and drug-addicts. It is possible that I appreciated the referees because they seemed to call things our way more often than not. For the most part, our kids treated the referees and other teams with respect and I was proud of them for that as well.
It was interesting to note the contrast in the bleachers between our kids and the rest of the kids there. I know that I am sounding like a proud parent who sees his/her children as little angels; some of the kids from Our Home will probably develop problems with the drugs and crime (and some may have already). But knowing their hard life stories and seeing them sitting in the gym, smiling and joking around with each other and the adults that accompanied them, really makes one feel like Our Home is taking an active approach in making a difference.
The tournament was a really positive experience for me. Some of the kids were a bit disappointed and thought they could have done better. At the same time, several of the boys said that they hadn’t ever done that well before. As I mentioned above, I have always felt that I have a positive outlook in life, but it seems that some of these kids are mentoring me to be even more so. Life has been very difficult for most if not all of them, yet they keep on smiling and goofing around. It was interesting that several of the kids asked if I was going to go to the next tournament. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Dave
