Hating waiting, but GOGO CHIPOLOPOLO

So I've officially started as the CA coordinator for Zambia; however, I'm still in Upper Michigan. Waiting on a work permit; sort of the usual, frustrating as we started the process in early December and now it's early February. Doubly frustrating due to the fact that Zambia National Football team, the Chipolopolo Boys, is playing in the Africa Cup of Nations finale on Sunday. In my mind's eye I can picture the groundswell of support for the team in-country; I'm sure everything is effectively at a standstill due to the anticipation, doubly so given that this game is the culmination of a 17 year comeback.

The only personal point of reference I have with Zambia prior to January 2004 was from when I was a senior in high school, and I can distinctly remember hearing on the news about the entire Zambian national football team (sans their captain and now-president, Kalusha Bwalya) crashing into the Bight of Biafra. At the time, I thought, "Huh. That's too bad ... where the heck is Zambia?" and then, like all 17-year-olds, I forgot about it and resumed thinking about girls, food, American football, etc.

Little did I or most Americans grasp the sort of zeitgeist embodied in the national team. Sort of a no-brainer ... in a nation where nearly every little boy manufactures a ball out of worn-out plastic bags tied together with strings or condoms, and the most common scene in any village, any compound, any school, is an intense pick-up game of football [soccer]. There is not a plethora of affordable alternative sports in such a poor nation; football [soccer] requires a bare minimum of equipment, essentially something to kick and something to mark the goals. At the national level, football [soccer] provides Zambia and Zambians with their largest and likely most common medium of exchange on the regional and global stage, something that they can point at with pride and say, "that's us! That's what we are!". Not oil, not war, not poverty (that's something to be acknowledged but not to boast about) ... not all of those other things; football!

So, to the diminutive 11 who in their copper-colored jerseys represent 13 millions (and about 1,000 nutty Peace Corps/Zambia alumni back here in the States) ... TULEYA CHIPOLOPOLO!!