Can I go outside and play?

At the end of every day I gather up my laptop, including the cord, pile my homework or any reading I need to do on top of it, and I head to the top floor to our 'living room'. At that point in time Kari and I should work out, but lately we have been hunkering down for a couple of more hours of work, breaking for dinner and going back to work. Today I sat down at the kitchen table to do some homework, because, um hello, statistics is hard. Then I hear Kari and Mo say we get to play futbol. I was so happy that tears of joy came to my eyes. I couldn't sit still, so I ran downstairs and changed. Then I came upstairs and I was ready. No, really, I was ready. I had to sit and wait for awhile, but then finally after half an hour we went outside. Did I mention I was so ecstatically happy. We have not been able to go outside and play ever. We were supposed to play with one of the other staff, but he could not make it. That meant we had no soccer ball.

We tried to explain to the guard and our driver that we were just walking over to the field. Our driver was really trying to drive us somewhere. We just gave up and walked away. There was no way I was going back inside. So, Mo and I start jogging towards the soccer/basketball field. Kari refused to do something so indecorous. Keep in mind we still did not have a ball. So, we started jogging around the field, which was the size of a basket ball court, not a soccer field. After a couple of laps we switched directions. For every step that Mo took, I took two and for every step I took, Kari took two. He could have lapped us about ten times. At this point our security guards wander over and they truly do not know what to do with us. At one point I was so giddy and laughing so hard that I couldn't run anymore. Crazy Americans! One of our guards went and talked to the guard at the gate to our compound and thankfully he had a soccer ball.

Keep in mind, I am a swimmer. I played kickball with the boys in grade school and I had one semester of gym class in high school. Kari was on the soccer team, probably the basketball team and I'm sure if they would have let her she would have been on the football team. Of course Mo was a soccer star. Basically, I just ran around and laughed a lot. Then, as dusk fell, Mo was kicking the ball across the court and we couldn't see the ball until it hit us, so we switched to basketball. I did pretty good and in fact Kari and I won. Our guards were laughing and cheering us on. We played until the bats were swooping over the court (let me rephrase that, they were actually swooping in the court), the sun had gone down and it was so dark we couldn't see the ball. It was kind of like when you were a kid and your mom was calling, but you really didn't want to go home. Just one more game.