Yesterday we were able to run a skills camp at Seminario High School for teenage boys and girls. We did drills to help them with layups, shooting, dribbling, passing, and defense. Our guide Paul said that Seminario was the school to go to for basketball so a lot of the kids were pretty good!
I helped to run the passing station with Sarah and Molly and we did drills like partner passing, hot potato, and monkey in the middle. It was really entertaining to watch us try to explain the drills to them in a mixture of Spanish and English. Luckily Molly is an expert in Spanish and a fair number of the older kids were fluent in English.
Even with that though, we would explain a drill or try to show them how it was done and you could tell by the looks on their faces that they had no clue what we were saying! Usually there was at least one person in the group who understood and then would talk really fast in Spanish to all the other kids and then they would all nod and smile. It was really cool to see how these kids truly loved basketball and would go through the drills hard all the time and when you showed them something they paid attention and tried to fix whatever they were doing wrong.
After the camp we gave them all Norse sweatbands which they put on right away! We also formed a dance circle after the huddle where Ri showed off some dance skills by doing “the worm” and a bunch of the Seminario guys joined in too (some had some pretty good moves!) All of them kept wanting to take talk to us and take pictures with us! Everyone was so nice and always smiling.
When I was explaining how to do a between the legs dribble to one of the younger girls named Anna (I think…), it was clear that she had no clue what I was saying at all! She just smiled and nodded like she understood but then we both started laughing and struggled through it together. By the end of the station she had gotten the hang of it though!
On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a market that sold a bunch of souvenirs. It was huge and sold everything from bracelets and jewelry to backpacks and bowls. Everything there was really bright and colorful and a lot of it was carved from wood. The vendors were really funny trying to sell us things, but you could always barter with them for a better price! The one guy kept following Sarah and I around telling us that he was going to be unemployed if we didn’t buy something from him! I got some cool wooden glasses and painted coffee mugs for the fam as well as t-shirt for my brother! Sarah found a really neat painting of the country’s volcano on a piece of tree bark to give to her mom!
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