weeks 2 and 3
121009 - This day I spend with a talented player I’ve mentioned before named Paul. He is 16 and built for baseball. I had never really had a chance to sit down with him so I started from scratch. He started playing when he was 12 at Sharing and took to the game immediately. He showed me two small baseball books he had, one was called Mac Attack and the other was Sluggin’ Sammy. I’m sure you can figure out the content. 
Most of the players here know about Sosa and McGuire. At first I thought it would be something that I would want to hide or sweep under the rug with the steroids taint on the 1998 homerun chase, but I’m beginning to think that it actually adds another layer of complexity that may be worth exploring. I haven’t told any of them about the steroids issue with those players though. Perhaps I should. And depending on the distribution outlet this project lands with, maybe it will be hidden after all. I think though that letting the images of juiced up sluggers speak for themselves is the way to go here.
We conduct the second half of the interview at a sports bar near his home called Jay’s Sports pub which provides a pretty great backdrop with their christmas lights up. The bartender tells us that when baseball comes on tv (through ESPN on satellite on occasion) he comes and gets Paul. I’ll have to be ready to film that when baseball starts up again in spring.
The day ends at another practice at St. Peters. Paul’s future in baseball probably lies in the outfield or at third base. He has a very “long” swing, I’d like to cut it down a bit. His bat is in the hitting zone for a long time which is nice but his footwork is too big and complicated to sustain. He has a lot of work to put in skillwise in baseball, but physically, he is definitely a prospect. He also never stops smiling. Ever.
121109 - There is a clinic being held at Kambogo on this day led by the Japanese. The influential coach I mentioned of the Fighters is going to be there. His name is Yuchi. I dont know what else they have planned.
When we get there (about an hour east of Kampala) we find about 7 Japanese coaches leading a clinic for about 50 boys of all ages. One of the Japanese is a minor league player in the Washington Nationals system (rookie ball). His English isn’t very good but he puts on a batting practice display and tries to give the kids a few pointers. He isn’t there very long. From what I can gather he is mostly going on a mountain climbing trip but wanted to see the baseball while he could.
I get a chance to interview Yuchi. It’s okay. It’s tough to get real answers out of some of the Japanese coaches here. They give a lot of “by the book” responses about their organization and what not. There were probably a few nuggets to use, but nothing very memorable.
A team just learning the game came from Masaka. They had a handmade bat. I’d never seen that before.
121209 - It rained hard in the morning. I was stuck in the mud with my driver Paul for several hours. I’ve been stuck in the mud in Africa many times but this was by far the worst. I, along with 6 other workers at the complex, had to push the car with Paul spinning the tires quite a while before we unstuck ourselves.
I finally got into Nsambya at around 3. We meet up with Alex and hop in a taxi to visit Lillian. He calls her his “girlfriend” on the way, but I still think that is mostly wishful thinking. When we get to her house it is very nice, built with brick, which is rare here. It’s clean and has a nice sound system. It is certainly not the ghetto that Alex comes from.
Alex mentions a few times how nice it is to me and that one day he’ll build a house that’s even better than this one.
Lillian tries to find her Aunt. Alex wants to ask her permission for Lillian to come train baseball with them a couple times a week. Lillian’s parents both died of AIDS when she was 6 so she has been living with her Aunt who she calls her step mom since then. She is no where to be found, or busy, I couldn’t tell. There is a lot of nervous whispering between Alex and Lillian. There is something uncomfortable about talking about the step mom I gather.
She isn’t going to show up so Alex and Lillian go to a little restaurant on her block for some food. It’s sort of a date I guess. It goes okay for Alex, though she still seems somewhat bored with him.
We grab a taxi back to George’s where I sit with Benard and Aron as they plan for an exhibition game they want to put on in Nsambya on the 19th. They draft an invitation letter to present to the two other 16 and over teams in the country from Kambogo and Lugazi. I then follow them to a small printer in the ghetto who prints out 4 copies and gets the last one out of the machine just as the power in the city shuts down. That happens a lot here.
121309 - The 16 and over teams I mentioned have been playing organized games on Sundays for a few weeks now, so today we go to Lugazi to watch. This is the best baseball in the country.
I keep my eye on a player I like quite a bit from Kambogo. His name is Watero. He is strong, fast, and plays with confidence. He has a “cool” about him and seems popular with the ladies.
He pitches the first game and his delivery is all arm. But he’s strong enough to run the fastball up there in the mid 80’s it looks like. Not much on the curveball. I don’t think he is made out to be a pitcher, but it’s hard to ignore his strength. In his first at bat he hits a long homerun off of Benard’s slider over a fence at least 325 feet out in left field. I’m intrigued.
After he rounds the bases I ask his age. He tells me he just turned 16 in May. Now I’m very intrigued. I hesitate to say he is “the one” since that basically sets him up for failure, but I’ll leave it at this. I would absolutely love to get him to Italy next year.
There is a player that shows up from Lugazi who is upset and I’m not sure why. I ask around and I find out that his father just died… as in about 8 hours before the game, from malaria. His mom didn’t even know yet. But he wanted to play. I talk to him for a bit on camera but he isn’t really in the mood to talk, I don’t blame him. He just wanted to play and find some comfort there. I think he did. I hope he did.
Benard gets a phone call from his school telling him he has to travel there this evening to pick up the work papers (the ones his mom urged him to fill out). He is annoyed, but he’ll do it. And I’ll follow. So I’m not sure where the night will end.
It ended in his hometown in Soroti at 1am after 2 long hot dark taxi rides and picking up his work forms from his school in Jinja.
121409 - Benard’s task for the day is to try to fill out these forms and get himself back to Kampala. I spend most of the day trying to figure out exactly what these forms are. Basically, it is a kind of registration and proof that you graduated, some information about your interests, some references from teachers, and finally the preferences for your courses if you get invited to a public university. There is the possibility of some government sponsorship, I’m not sure how they determine who gets it. Mostly it seems like paying people money for nothing. The first step is a passport photo.
From there we bike to his grandfather to wait for his older brother Levi who filled out these forms last year for help. The next step is getting a stamp from LC1 (local council). His brother eventually shows up and we walk to what I’m expecting to be some kind of local government building where a councilman might work. Instead, I follow them into a mud home where they ask a woman where the LC1 is. She walks over to the edge of a forrest and shouts for him and walks away.
We wait by a tree and stare down a dirt path. A man comes walking out of the woods. It’s something like the Wizard of Oz. He is apparently Local Councilman number 1. He goes into his house and comes out with an ink pad and an old stamp. The stamp goes on the form and on we go to Local Councilman #3.
I’ll spare the mundane details of filling out this form. The highlights were a birth certificate that he needed to include. So he purchased one from LC3 for 7,000 shillings (about $3.25). That could be an interesting foreshadow to proving ages for a future little league tournament. I know several of the younger players here who don’t know their birthday. Benard also has 2 “certificates of participation” from his trip to Japan and his trip to Italy which he will include with the forms as proof of his extra curricular achievements.
Time is getting late for us to get back to Jinja to meet with his counselor to complete the forms but of course we have to go to the hospital to greet his mother for no reason. I’ve come to build in these time wasters into my schedule. After greeting his mother we know there is no way we’ll get to the school in time. So, we taxi to Jinja and spend the night in a hotel.
121509 - We go to his school early to wait for the counselor so he can complete the form. The teacher tells us to arrive at 8am. He shows up at 11.
Their meeting is actually some good filming since it forces Benard to verbalize some of the other avenues for his life if baseball isn’t the only thing. He tells the counselor he has a strong interest in computers and Information Sciences. They fill out the course preferences from the 7 or 8 public universities in the country. The only thing left to do is pay a “transport” fee, which I’m 95% sure goes into the counselor’s pocket, and then of course get letters from his teacher to back up the certificates of participation for the baseball programs he is including in his application. In Africa you need a certificate for a certificate, and then usually a few phone calls and bribes to prove anything. The teacher who needs to provide these letters is Paul Llwanga, one of the people who showed jealousy about Benard’s trip to Italy amongst other things. We’ll see if he really writes the letter. I think he already asked for some money to write them.
Paul drives us back to Kampala and I find Alex. He is in a somber mood. I wasn’t planning on doing much with him but I could tell he wanted to talk. I flip the camera on and he tells me all about Lillian’s step mom. I learn that she regularly beats her and doesn’t allow her any freedom. She also doesn’t want her seeing Alex since he is a 
“muyaya” which is a local word meaning something close to “bum” or “street kid.” Lillian calls Alex crying about it. So maybe she does like him after all but isn’t allowed to? I’m still not sure. Alex is urging her to leave that house and move in with her older sister in Entebbe. It’s a very good interview.
We end at a practice at St. Peters. It is clear the team needs to work on hitting curve balls. I’m getting my arm back in shape so I can throw some to them next week.
121609 - There is more rain this morning which delays us a bit. I get into the city to film Benard making a poster to advertise the exhibition game on the 19th. We go to a different printer who has a computer with Word. They whip up a clip art ladden flyer and print off 20 copies. We pick up some tape to post them around the ghetto but the tape is useless. So, instead tony makes glue out of cassava porridge and hot water, apparently this is how you do it.
I get some golden shots of the kids posting up this flyer all over Nsambya with kids and adults checking it out. They of course are curious what this white guy with an expensive camera is doing filming a piece of paper on a falling wall in the ghetto. I think my presence being here as an American making a film about baseball is something of a subplot in the story, and hopefully it comes through without putting myself into the film which I’m reluctant to do.
We end the day at a practice at sharing. One of the head priests from Spain calls a meeting with the coaches of all the sports to discuss budgets and introduce himself. It’s mostly a boring meeting, but he brings up the idea of membership fees. There is no way the kids can afford even a penny a month. This Spanish priest is new to the country, and you can tell.
121709 - Another rainy morning, tis the season I suppose. I get into the ghetto hoping to get some shots of the posters that are stuck around, but the mud makes it nearly impossible. I pretty much scrap the day and go to the university with Paul to use the internet.
121809 - I follow Aron and Benard down to the field for the next day’s exhibition game. They decide where homeplate will be and some other logistics. Then they walk through Nsambya to invite some food venders to come provide food for the players and sell to spectators. We arrange a music system to help attract a crowd and get an MC to help explain some of the rules and try to get the audience into the game a bit.
We head back to George’s where they make meal tickets to distribute to the players to redeem their lunches which will consist of Chapati (flatbread) and a Banana. They make the meal tickets difficult to forge by making an imprint with a coin that Aron had from Japan with a pencil on notebook paper. Very pretty filming.
I go to check in on Alex. He’s sick. Malaria. No one treats it like a big deal. I guess it isn’t. I let him sleep. I wait around for the sundown golden hour to grab a few poster shots that I missed the day before.
I stay with Eric in Nsambya to be at the field for the exhibition game early the next day.
121909 - The big game goes well. The music system is late, the food is late, the water is late, but the players are on time. They lay chalk lines with cassava flour and string. When we get the music system up and running after securing some power people start to filter in from the street to watch.
They end up getting a decent crowd in the morning. It’s the first time that most of them have seen the game and they seem to really enjoy it. Lambert does a great job as the MC and it seems that a lot of the kids and adults start to pick up some basics, at least when to applaud.
Kambogo wins all their games. They have definitely overtaken the fighters as the best baseball in the country. They are lucky to have a lot of good ground to train and live fairly close to each other, enough to train as a team regularly. Watero hits another homerun. I line up a lot of filming with him and his team after Christmas.
One person who is attracted by the MC talking about baseball is an American named Michael who works at the nearby embassy. He comes down to watch and is blown away. He tells me has been here 6 months and had no idea that this was right under his nose. He used to pitch at a university in Texas. He asks Lugazi if he can throw an inning or two with them, they say of course and he rushes back to change. He is pretty good with his fastball touching 90 it seems. It’s great practice for the kids as he pitches above most of their hitting speeds. I’m curious to see what Watero can do against him. He ropes a single to left off the fastball.
Michael tells me how he knows everyone at the embassy would be fascinated with this. We exchange information and he says he’d loved to get involved and help coach.
I’m taking the next 2 days off to catch up on the footage organizing.
And yeah, still healthy.
