January 2012:

History is Made with Canadian Visit

January 2012 was a very significant month.  The one thing that the world heard and read about was the visit of the Canadian Little League team from Vancouver, BC to Uganda.  They arrived on the evening of January 14 and left Uganda on the evening of January 21.  The New York Times, the Washington Times, the Toronto Newspapers and broadcasters covered this story, as did ESPN and Aljazira, amongst others.  They came to play the game that was supposed to take place last August at the Little League World Series.  The game was played on January 17 at the Uganda Little League complex with several hundred spectators.  Certainly the largest crowd to ever watch a baseball game in Uganda in anyone's memory.  Uganda won two to one, but that was in my mind incidental to the event.  In my mind, the biggest significant event was that about 50 visitors came from Canada and not one was eaten by a lion when they go off the plane at Entebbe Airport.  Why is this important?  Because the Americans that make up the Saudi Arabian team, according to Little League International, claim that they will never play a game in Africa because it is too dangerous and that is why the Middle East/Africa Regional Tournament must always be played in Poland.  The Canadians have destroyed that argument.  How Little League International now justifies playing this tournament in Poland will be interesting to hear.

During the two weeks starting on January 7 and going thru January 20, the Little League complex hosted about 90 coaches, teachers who will become baseball or softball coaches, two teams of 11-12 year olds for the first week and two teams of 13-15 year olds the second week and a contingent of an additional 40 visitors from Kenya during the second week, in addition to about 25 girl coaches learning to pitch windmill as taught by three Peace Corps Volunteers.  All the coaches were being taught the fine points of how to play the game with topics being covered such as the role of the first base and third base coaches, making line ups, evaluating players and positions, game strategy and when to hit and run or sacrifice.  At the same time, all coaches were instructed on umpiring mechanics and techniques.  The purpose of the teams playing the games was to give the coaches an opportunity to practice what they were being taught, including umpiring the games.   Each day, classes were held from 9 to 10AM.  Two hours of actually demonstration followed.  At 2PM, games were played every day with the games being coached and umpired by the trainees.  At 5PM, every coach was required to play in our daily softball games, with a number of the later games using the newly trained windmill pitchers.  At 8PM, the 2011 World Series games were shown to point out the method of really playing the game and the mistakes that are made by umpires who were not asked to get help, and the problems of using all your players when the games go into extra innings.  This World Series, with the comments made by the television commentators was a great training tool and we have to thank Major League Baseball for supplying us with the DVDs.

On January 11, the Uganda Sports Commissioner launched the governments Sports School program.  While the program will establish 32 secondary schools as sport schools starting the 2013 school year, with the remaining 100 or so starting in future years, two schools will start this school year with softball in an all girls school and baseball in a boys school.  Both schools involved sent teachers who will become coaches to our two week training program.  We in turn equipped them with gloves, bats, helmets, catcher's equipment and balls to start a 4 team league of S1 and S2 students playing a game a week.  Each school will have a Peace Corps volunteer assigned to supervise the league operation.  We and the Uganda Sports Commissioner will use these two schools as prototypes which will help in getting Parliament to fully fund the program in future years with the goal that the program will produce student/athletes that will provide Uganda with competitive International teams in many sports.  For baseball and softball, it will spread the game rapidly throughout the country and give thousands of ball players the opportunity to develop their skills in a highly competitive environment.  In the words of Jimmy Rollins and Derek Lee, who visited during the Canadian teams visit, the ball players of Uganda have the natural fluid motions and the talent to be major league players. 

Medical:

Uganda Cancer Research Center has been formally registered in Uganda.  We have an agreement to establish the center to cure prostate cancer as soon as we can build the building and obtain the staff.  We already have the land with power and water at the site.  To do that, we are now searching for a grant of $1,000,000.  Once that grant is obtained, we expect the building to be finished in 6 months time.  The HIFU company will supply the instrument to cure the prostate cancer as soon as the building is ready.  Esaote will send the mammogram machine and the hand held ultra sound instrument that they have already donated.  If we get a grant for additional money, we will begin to do breast examinations and needle biopsies.  The Techniscan instruments are expected to be ready by early 2012.  In order to install them and set up the communications and computer network will take an additional 2.5 million in grant money.  That money would allow us to do the breast examinations and breast cancer treatments at no cost for the women for 5 years.  We now need the grant money.