I've waited literally weeks for today - the first American football game ever played in Africa, and it was here in Arusha, TZ!
Started off as a comedy of errors, though. As of about Wednesday I had no idea how to get tickets, and I was in Karanse for the week, not to get back till late Friday afternoon. I emailed our Joshua team about how desperate Janet and I were for tickets, and if anyone found out how to get them and got some for us, we'd gladly pay for them when we got back. (Not knowing how much they'd cost, even!)
Yesterday, when I picked Janet up at the school where she mentors, I was about to tell her about my email since I knew she hadn't had computer all week, either. She said, "Didn't you get my text? Don (a Joshua visitor and friend of Janet's)sent me a text saying he has us VIP tickets." I was so excited! I didn't know or care what VIP meant in Tanzania; I just was excited about having tickets! This morning, she came to my house at 9 just frantic, saying she'd spoken to Don, and he hadn't sent her a text about tickets, and she didn't think we had any, and it was the day of the game, etc. I asked her more specifically what the text had said, who did it say sent it, anything else I could think of to undestand where "our" tickets were. She said she showed Don her phone (she's pretty technology-limited!), and they tried calling the number that the text had come from, but got a message that the number was unavailable (only she thought that meant it was not a real number!) So she thought this was a big scam and was worried about someone having her number, etc.! We decided we'd just go into town early and see about getting tickets, so she left and I raced around getting ready. In the meantime, I realized she'd left her phone at my house, and she received a message saying the number was now available. Almost mmediately she showed back up at my house to see if I had her phone, and so I had her call the mystery number again. It was Allan Stephenson, our Joshua head! He had us 4 free VIP tickets! We just had to go into town and pick them up.
So, crisis averted! We had to go to town anyway to run errands, so Don and Neil, another friend at Joshua (both are from Australia/NZ) were going to meet us in town in time to go to the game. That all went very smoothly, except traffic was particularly atrocious today; we blamed it on the game, with me saying there was always extra traffic on game days at home!
We took our VIP tickets into the "special" area reserved for us, and then it got even funnier. VIP meant we got to sit under a roof in plastic chairs instead of in the sun on concrete bleachers, but there were no assigned seats, and as near as I could tell, no real correlation between how many seats were sold and how many seats there actually were! We found 3 seats together by booting out the children of 2 guys I know from Imara (both from Australia with no knowledge of the game), and Neil sat in a row somewhere behind the 3 of us. Darran, Bruce, and Don kept us busy with questions about what everything meant, and thankfully we knew most of the answers! I was wearing my "normal" football game clothes: a USC t-shirt and black jean capris, only missing my earrings and stick-on tattoos that I usually wear!
Drake University won pretty handily, 17-7, and a good time was had by all.
Missed tailgating, national anthem (we may have gotten there right after that, if it was sung), but made it in time for kick-off. Took lots of pictures and hope to get them downloaded soon. Big fun!
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