Ever since I got here I have been looking for a way for me to play volleyball. Through other Peace Corps volunteers I was put in touch with a man named junior who runs a club team. He told me to come to the courts on the Carinage at 3:30 on Sunday and we could work something out. While people have explained to me that time here is different than it is in the states, and when people say 3:30 they don’t mean 3:30, I still can’t get myself to show up to anything later than the time they tell me to be there! An old camp rhyme rings in my head: “Early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable.”
So of course I get to the courts at 3:30, and of course I am the ONLY person there. At 4:00 a few people showed up. They looked pretty young but they had a volleyball and were hitting around, so I worked up the courage and went over and asked to hit around with them. We did this for maybe 30 minutes, more people showed to play basket ball, some other people showed up and were skate boarding. I was beginning to get confused as to what was going on here. At around 4:45 some older looking people arrived and began to sit against the fence. At this point I was so confused as to who was here to play what and who I should be introducing myself to. I decided to sit along the fence, at this point it is now 5:00. I heard people asking where Junior was, so I figured these were the people I should be sitting with, which then made me realize that the people I had been playing with for the past 45 minutes had nothing to do with the club. As it approached 5:30 people started complaining saying “junior told us to be here at 3:30, where is he!” I couldn’t help but laugh out loud! These people were complaining about waiting around since 3:30, when I was the ONLY person here at that time. When Junior got there, at 5:30, people began warming up, and he came over and introduced me to everyone. The warm up is happening very quickly and all of sudden the girls line up to start doing spikes. I’ve never done spiked in my life! I try to stay in the back of the line and have people cut me to avoid going. I try to explain that I’ve only played very casually, but the girl behind me insists that I go. As the girl sets the ball for me I jump, and of course I jump too early and land back on the ground before my hand could reach the ball, and end up spiking it right into the net. The people sitting on the side lines laughed. I tried to hide my embarrassment, and the fact that I was completely overwhelmed. When we actually started playing it was 6:00. The two teams, the girl’s team and the boy’s team, were going to have a scrimmage. It would be best out of 3 games. They rotated me into the second game. I was extremely nervous and more or less avoided the ball in hopes to avoid embarrassing myself again. The few times the ball came my way I handled myself well. At the end of the night I asked the captain of the girl’s team, Stacie, if I could come back to their next practice, she said yes. At this point I thought that everything was set, however I didn’t realize that after I left they would be discussing whether I was good enough to join the club. Last night I received an email from junior reading “Cara, so we evaluated your playing, you bounce well, but I noticed some things you might want to work out. We would like to invite you to come back and play, and if we decide to invite you to be a member it will be 10 dollars a month.” I felt like I had applied to a job and made it to the second round of interviews. Practice is at 6:30am on Saturday, aka tomorrow, so tonight might be another lame night at home.
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