One of the fun activities that some of us do here is play softball. We usually play pick up games of softball on Saturday afternoons. Each year, there are also two softball tournaments: one in Niamey in October and one in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in February. The teams participating are different every time depending on who's around and available. Last month, we took a rather unique team to the tournament in Ouaga. Our team was made up of missionaries from 5 different missions, volunteers with the Japanese version of the Peace Corps, a US Marine, and someone from a humanitarian organization. We drove about 6 hours to Ouaga for the weekend tournament.
3 of us from our team went expecting to sleep on the floor of a guesthouse. When we arrived, we discovered that the hospitality committee found other housing for us. They arranged for us to stay at the US Ambassador's house. They haven't had an ambassador there for a while, so the house was empty. It was a fun treat to crash at the ambassador's house for the weekend. Somehow I ended up with the master bedroom.
The first day of the tournament was a pool system where we played each of the other three teams in the competitive division. We lost all three of our games. Since there were only 4 teams in the competitive division, all 4 teams played again the next day in the semi-finals. We won our game and made it to the finals. Then, we won the finals. We finished the tournament with a losing record (2-3), but we won the tournament. It was fun to see the team come together and play well when it counted.
The picture above is our team as well as the team we played in the finals (the Burkina Bats).
Here's our team: the Niamey Nomads.
