August blog

Blog- August

So august saw the departure of the my visitors but not before the football competition. This was the under 15s competition for the island (opposed to the adult one in flores I mentioned in the last post). My team was fairly awful, which was possibly to do with the lack of quality players and partially the manager. I was coaching the football school team whereas the other coach from the football team was managing the team for the local area. It was him who decided who played for the area team and who played for the football school. As a strange coincidence, all the players who appear to have hit their teenage growth spurt as well as being technically gifted were in the locality team whereas my team was made up of the seven dwarfs plus two hobbits (it was nine aside).

Anyway, my lads were physically bullied by the opposition who were all far closer to the fifteen years old cut off age and drew two games and lost the third meaning we didn’t get out of the group stage.

I was, as anyone who has seen me watch or play football, the stereotypically overly vocal football manager. Although, as I found out, this is far far harder in a second language. At one point, I was incensed by a foul on one of my players and shouted at the “kartu pirring” when what I meant was ‘kartu kunning’ as a result, instead of telling the referee to give the opposition player a yellow card, I just shouted out ‘plate card’ (as in a plate you put food on) which makes about as much sense in Indonesian as it does in English. There was a very strange moment as the referee, all the players and the crowd which was probably 100+ all sort of stopped and just looked at me in a very confused manner....

As you will see from the pictures, I shunned the ‘crombie’ manager wardrobe and instead pose as a player in the hope that I could pass myself off as being a freakishly tall albino 14 year old who had already developed a great deal of facial hair, my plan was not a success......

Some of the crowd became prepared for my teams wayward finishing

WOMAN WITH HELMET photo

The end of august brought a nice holiday in Alor. Alor is a small island in the north west of NTT. It’s a beautiful small island famed for it’s diving (which I had my first ever try at). Had a really good time, was just so nice to get away from the hospital for a week and try something new. I should say, the diving instructor was a german guy called Tomas, he was cool but also just reminded me of the shark hunter in Jaws, he really did seem like someone who just wanted to get into the water and go mono et mono with a giant shark. Although having said that, the only photo I can find of him (with a dashing young man in the background) he looks decidedly like Bill Murray in the life Aquatic.

PHOTO OF MAN WITH FISH

And some evidence I did actually go diving

DIVING PHOTO

But I will I do look far from graceful in this photo!

I should say, I really needed the break from work. As part of my job in the hospital I had been auditing old medical records within the hospital in order to find any that were still current. This mean I had to go through all the records over five years old and see if any had been used in that time. Some of these had various drawings from when some of the doctors had become bored during appointments (a bird, a house and one time what looked like a camel) but also the always useful description of an appointment, just two words- ‘orang sakit’ which translated as ‘sick person’.

Anyway, at that time my basic day consisted of- get up, go to work, read medical records, go home, sleep, repeat. By the time I’d gone on holiday, I think I’d looked through something like 10,000 which was only about a fifth of all the records. Fun times.....