Meet the Team - Ali Hardie

Initial Thoughts:
I came from a sports coaching background and I’ve been doing it at home and loved it, so this gave me the chance to do this in a different culture. It was exciting to do it in Africa and I spoke to Kyle and Tom from last year. I had no idea that it would not be coaching in organised sessions, similar numbers per week. I had no idea about the traditional singing and dancing routines, but I’ve had to do classroom sessions and I absolutely love it! The answers the kids give are so much fun.

Impressions of Lusaka/Zambia:
Lusaka is really weird. There’s no centre to speak of. Sprawls of communities and schools. Occasionally I click and work out where I am but it’s a real mish mash of groups of communities joined by bus routes. I imagined I’d be in one place, focussed, but I’ve spent so much time going around in buses and sitting in empty fields waiting for random people to turn up.

Impressions of the Value of the Project:
I’ve got a load of different projects but somehow they don’t join up. I get good relationships with kids, but I have different classes once a week and you get to see them, on average, once a fortnight so it’s difficult to keep things going. My understanding is that we coach and make the connection through sport and then you exploit that to take another message. It’s been important to get to know the kids, chat with them and then sometimes something comes out of that. You can sit and listen but you often feel powerless to help them. You find kids from double orphan families and we offer an hour or two of escapism, but not much else. Is that worthwhile?

I’ve personally gained so much from it. I’ve been in the position of having to take classes of 40 to 50 kids unexpectedly, both in the classroom when I’m not comfortable and on the sports field. I’ve worked out now what I can do, confirmed some abilities I didn’t know I had, but I don’t know how much it has helped the kids. There’s always the argument that there are some areas in Scotland that have a similar life expectancy and we might offer something to them instead. The communication issues are minimised, the mentoring would be easier, perhaps. Maybe charity begins at home? Just a thought……

Impressions of the Team:
I’ve been chucked in with a completely different crowd of people and we get on really well now.

I think it’s been relatively easy because we’ve all come in open minded, determined to bond because we’d be sharing experiences with each other, going through similar challenges.

SIA – I think there’s a lot of very good people, proud of their country and committed to improving it. There’s so much good intention, but so much of it is wasted. The peer leaders often aren’t there or sessions are cancelled. It might be important to feed that back to the SIA.