WAIST

WAIST stands for
West
African
International
Softball
Tournament
and it is perhaps one of the best ideas anyone has ever had. Bring together hundreds of Peace Corps volunteers and local Senegalese teams, raise a bunch of money for cool projects, give volunteers an excuse to travel to a legitimate city from their scattered home villages, play competitive softball in crazy costumes, and drink heavily.

WAIST takes place every year on President’s Day weekend, in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and (I think) the biggest city in West Africa. This is awesome for us, because they have real food, they have iced beverages, they have reliable electricity, the water most likely won’t give you parasites, and white folks are hardly noticed since the city is so attractive to ex-pats.

The Gambia is represented well here at WAIST. We have two teams from our tiny country. Other teams include the local embassy workers (who are jerks to play against), numerous Senegal Peace Corps volunteer teams (who are hilarious to play against), and even a team of Cape Verde volunteers + refugees. This includes those volunteers who were recently evacuated from Niger and reassigned placements.

We arrived on Thursday afternoon, and games began on Saturday. So Friday, people went crazy in Dakar. Some people, for a touch of normalcy, went to the giant and expensive mall overlooking the ocean. Others, with a sense of adventure, paid 500 CFA (about $1) to jump on a trampoline for fifteen minutes, also overlooking the ocean. Others, such as myself, went to numerous markets to find sweet African wares (because there’s nothing better than receiving the question ‘Where’d you get that’ and being able to respond ‘Dakar’ or some other exotic place they’ve most likely never been), ate delicious food (a salad, the likes of which is impossible to get anywhere in the nation of the Gambia) at a moderately priced restaurant, ate heaps of gourmet ice cream, and walked around, taking it all in.

On Saturday, the games began. We walked to the field from our hostel, and were bombarded with color, shine, and alcohol once we entered the fields. Different Peace Corps teams were dressed in different CRAZY costumes. One team had taken African fabric and made it into liederhosen, and had found appropriate hats to match the liederhosen. One team all had various befuddled Senegalese tailors make them tutus out of shiny tulle. Even the dudes rocked the tutus. One team was dressed as the characters from jersey shore (I didn’t get the reference, but apparently it’s a big deal). Another team was cops and robbers, and they had all kinds of antics on the field.

The first team we played on Friday was dressed entirely in tutus. They were also severely intoxicated. We crushed them 17-0. I pitched, and my team played great behind me.

Our second game we played the jersey shore team. They were also reprehensibly intoxicated, and after seeing the first game that we played, just wanted to forfeit. However, we convinced them to play, and handily beat them, 21-0.

After the first two games, we had some concerned people approach us carefully, and ask us why we were so serious. We didn’t carry our beers onto the field, so apparently that was way too serious for the volunteers who came to drink competitively, as opposed to competitively play softball. We told them we wanted to win, and they looked at us bewilderedly, shook their heads, shrugged their shoulders, and sauntered towards the bar.

After one of our games, at our team huddle, our second basemen drew out attention to the plentiful amounts of glass in the field. We were concerned for the welfare of the knees and shins of the people playing on the field, so we tried to pick up all the glass we could. The next field we played on had the same problem – the second basemen noticed it and we tried to pick it up. Our coach type character told the commissioner (yes, this informal tournament had a commissioner), and he said that they were aware of the problem. When they re-dirted the fields before the season, they accidentally got construction debris dirt instead of clean dirt, so glass was everywhere on all three fields. Things like this reminded all of us that we were still in Africa.

Throughout our three days and six games, we played two teams that were actually competitive. One of them was a team of embassy workers, and as a pitcher working against their batters, I hated everything about this team. I am under the impression that slow pitch softball is a smash and dash kind of game, where if a pitch comes in, you want to crush it as far as you can. But the old people on this team were of a different mindset; they wanted to get walked around the bases. In our first four games, we allowed 5 runs, and I walked in all of them during the game against the embassy. However, we ended up slaughtering that team regardless, and I felt the sweet, sweet taste of victory against an underhanded, un-noble foe. The righteous always prevail.

We ended up winning third place in our division. We only lost to one team, and that was a Senegalese team who practices year round. We beat every Peace Corps team, so I could leave Dakar knowing that even if we weren’t better than everyone, we crushed the rest of Peace Corps West Africa.

Everyone from my team went to the championship game, because the awards ceremony was scheduled for immediately after. While the championship team was celebrating their win, we gathered together and discussed how we would celebrate when they called our names to collect our trophies. Our coach had bought a bottle of hard cider, and we had epic plans similar to a locker room after a World Series victory. We finalized our celebration routine, walked to where the trophies were sitting, and found most people had dispersed, and our lonesome trophy was sitting there, waiting for us. No one called our names, no one acknowledged our great achievement. So, we snatched our trophy, took it to the pitchers mound, and leapt around, sprayed hard cider like it was champagne, and took turns kissing our prize.

The trophy itself was an ugly thing. It was carved by a local artisan, so I guess the cultural aspect made up for its hideous appearance. It was a small ogre-ish black man, wearing an enormous baseball cap, and hunched over like Quasimodo. It was about the size of a gallon of milk, and it was ours.

I volunteered to take the trophy home, and brought it back to our hostel. We hung out there for a little while, reliving the moments and the triumph. I brought the trophy out to show our fans, and left it on the table as we laughed and planned the events of that night.

Before we left for that evening’s party, I checked to make sure it wasn’t still sitting on the table in the common area. Since it wasn’t, I assumed someone had taken it and put it in a safe place.

The next morning, we left at 5:30 am. After the shenanigans of the previous evening, nobody felt that great. We all got on the bus, and I paused in my mental checklist to ask, “Who has the trophy?” No one had seen it. I felt responsible, so I went back into the hostel to double check everywhere. It wasn’t there. I sent another volunteer in, to look and also alert the French-speaking hostel staff that we were looking for an ugly little wooden beast. She still couldn’t find it, so we left, assuming it’d been stolen or someone had packed it without realizing it.

We traveled in a bus for about 7 hours, crossed the border into the Gambia, and were on the ferry going to Banjul, when we were hypothesizing what could have happened to this trophy that we had worked so hard for. One of our most with it volunteers *SARCASTIC! NOT TRUE!* said, “Oh, yeah, I put that in the refrigerator last night.”

I cannot adequately describe my incredulity and fury at this moment. A million questions went through my head. Why didn’t you say anything when we were frantically looking for it? The fridge? Why didn’t you grab it? THE FRIDGE?

We called the hostel, they confirmed that our prize remained in the fridge, and now we have to figure out how to bring it to its rightful home, The Gambia.

But when it comes, we will welcome it with a ceremony and parade, and know that WAIST 2011 was a glorious victory for Peace Corps The Gambia.