My Tour of Cairo Hospitals aka Middle School Sports Festiva

It was a beautiful Wednesday afternoon around 2:00; I was alone in my office enjoying reading God Dies by the Nile during our school wide sustain silent reading time.  The students and coaches leaving for the ISAC Middle School Sports Festival had loaded up on the bus and headed on their way to Cairo thirty minutes previous, or so I thought, until our Athletic Director knocked on my door.  A expression of horror and shock flashed across my face, my eyes grew wide and I made the sign to ward off the devil as I backed away from our AD screaming, “No, No, No No!”.   And then he said the words I had been dreading, “Lianne has a temperature, she can’t go, how fast you can pack.”

We had just had another confirmed case of H1N1 that morning, closing down the 8^th grade class.  (For those of you who are counting, yes that is the fourth time the 8^th grade class has been shut down.  We’ve decided that we are going to give them a personal hygiene for health lecture when they return.)  It was touch and go all day long of whether the 8^th grade athletes going on the trip would be allowed to return to school to travel, if not we would have to withdraw from the tournament.  (In hindsight, this would have been the better option.)  So when Lianne, who hadn’t been feeling well all week, was running a high fever, there was no way the school was going to let her go.  Luckily, Lianne is a close friend and the kind that doesn’t mind throwing your underwear in a suit case while trying to help you pack in 15 minutes.  So within 15 minutes of the AD showing up at my office door, I was packed and on a bus with 18 5^th-8^th  We were an hour late getting started by that time so we said no stops on the way down.  Little did we know that we would hit the worst traffic ever in Cairo and a usually three hour drive lasted eight!!!  At one point we moved less than 100 meters in over an hour.  This was after the first couple hours of the trip where the kids did nothing but drink soda and each junk food, so their little bladders were pretty full by this time and I sure got an ear full hearing about it.  Despite the fact that they also all have their own iPod, cell phone, lap top, Blackberry, and Nintendo games with them, I heard them whine, “I’m so board” about every five minutes.  We arrived at our hosts well after ten, exhausted and hungry only to realize the first item I had forgotten to bring in my whirl wind packing experience.  

Things did not get better from here; I can’t even say we kicked off the tournament to a good start.  During the first minute of our first soccer came, one of my girls got hit in the arm with a soccer ball and fractured her arm.  The tournament was so tightly run on a time schedule, that I couldn’t even take extra time-outs for an injury.  So I had the school nurse talking in one ear, the girl’s parents on the phone on the other and still managed to coach the girls on the field!  Thank goodness I’m a multi-tasking woman!  

That same night, while I was chaperoning the Festival Dance (Ah the joys of watching a Middle School dance) a frantic mom called and insisted that we take her son, who had fallen during basketball earlier that day, to the hospital.  We had already determined that it was only a slight sprained wrist, but when you have a frantic mom calling, you do what you gotta do.   So a nice lovely visit to Cairo hospital number two was arranged.  

The next day wasn’t that much better.  After a full day of basketball outside in the hot Cairo sun, I was trying to enjoy a relaxing coaches dinner with the coaches from the other countries.  But I kept on receiving phone calls from two of my girls.  They were being hosted together and were on their way home for curfew with their host sister, the maid and the driver when the car can out of gas in the middle of a Cairo highway.  The girl that called, while no great athlete could win the Olympic speed talking championship; she also has the highest pitched voice I’ve ever heard on a pre-pubescent girl.  Now just try to imagine a blur of words in a high pitch squeal when this girls calls all panicked, and then the more panicked she gets the more Arabic words she through in until I can’t understand a thing she’s saying.  What started with frantic phone calls that the car had broken down, then turned into Farida doesn’t feel well, to Farida can’t breathe, to Frarida had passed out and is shaking, to we are going to the hospital with a lady we don’t know driving and we don’t know which hospital we are going to or what area of Cairo we are at.  Just try to imagine my sheer panic right now as the adult responsible for these girls!  (Damn you Lianne and your temperature)   About half and hour later I had managed to arrive at the right hospital and was already fielding crazed phone calls from parents, our Principal, and Athletic Director to the best of my ability in my cool calm professional manor. I’ll spare you all the medical mumbo jumbo but after several IV’s and medication the girl was released a few hours later.  It was well into the wee early morning hours when I returned to my host house to only discover that I was locked out because she was still out drinking with friends.

By the third day of the tournament I was down so many injured players that I barely had enough girls to play volleyball.  The other coaches took a vote to allow me to bend the ISAC rules when it came to substitution so that I could give my remaining girls a little bit of a break.   Needless to say, we did not win the tournament but thought we had at least made it through the final day without any more injuries.  Except for during the middle of the awards ceremony my fellow team coach jumped up and yelled at me to run over as he scooped up one of our boys that had fainted and had blood just pouring from his nose.  How embarrassing, our team can’t even sit in an auditorium without requiring medical supervision. The other coaches did vote for me and my team to win the Sportsmanship Award.  They were impressed by how many rotten things could keep happening to my team and we just kept on playing and trying our best with a smile our on face.

By the time we had returned back to our school the following afternoon, our Principal came out to meet our bus and I declared, “They are all alive, that’s the best that I could do.”, while he humbly and remorsefully apologized for sending me at the last minute on such a horrible trip.

Thank goodness it’s a short week.  I only have to make it through two days and then we have a four day weekend and we are going to the Siwa oasis.