A day in Jerusalem...

2/4/11

After 6 days of being here, the coolest thing that I’ve done so far was playing soccer in the park. It was amazing to see Luke and I make friends with people who were totally different than us, and who couldn’t speak the same language. Earlier in the day we had a meeting about different volunteer opportunities we could do. The one that immediately jumped off the page was a school in Jerusalem that needed help with after school club soccer. For some reason I doubted whether I not I should choose this one. It was what I normally would have done in the States and I wasn’t sure if there was another opportunity to get out of my comfort zone at some place at. So I prayed that God would guide my decision. Later that night, Mike the Canadian found a park online where people supposedly play ultimate Frisbee. We tagged along for fun even though we both can’t throw a disc. It took us 45 minutes to walk there and we ended up at a huge park. It was the central park of Jerusalem. It has tons of open fields of grass that even stay lit at night and we saw people playing football there. Luke and I also found a futsol court. It was right next a huge skate park. There were twenty-something’s everyone, hanging out in groups, smoking cigarettes and hookahs, and just relaxing. It was an inner city park. Luke and I wanted to play really bad but it seemed pretty exclusive- even to Arabs let alone us Americans! We watched for awhile and everyone was yelling and screaming most of the time- for fouls, losing the ball, dribbling too much, getting scored on… It was play 2 minutes, argue for 5 minutes. They seemed angry and we couldn’t tell if the two teams were friends or if they were Jews vs. Arabs. Eventually one of the goalies walked off and for a lack of better options they looked at us to see if we could play. So Luke jumped in goal while I held his wallet and my backpack cause we were in an inner city park in Jerusalem at night with twenty-somethings everywhere. Luke was understandably timid at first, letting in a soft goal- no one yelled at him though you could tell that if it was the other guy they would have let him have it. But eventually Luke calmed down and made some good passes- from goalie. They tried him in the field and could see he could play. He was making good passes and setting up other guys for goals. Eventually, the Arab goalie wanted to come out of goal- but his team wouldn’t let him. They screamed at him to get back in the goal, because he was their worst player, and they had just found someone better. They chose Luke over their own friend.

From that point on, I knew we were in. After that game they invited me to play. I passed our valuables off to Mike cause they were heading back to JUC. I jumped on a team who played against Luke’s team- it was winner stays. My team didn’t have the best players but we did have the most even-tempered team, which helped us win. We won a lot of games and eventually Luke joined us as people came and went as they pleased. Our team ran the show all night. We couldn’t understand what our teammates said but we knew they really liked us and were having fun. We stayed on the court for 4 hours- taking any team that came. It looked like people were calling their friends to come to the park cause of how good the games were. As each game passed we got closer with our team, and everyone playing accepted us more. In between games people were shooting on me in goal (cause I was making good saves) trying to score on the American. Everyone was joking around with us and having a good time. They would say to their friends (in Arabic or Hebrew) “Look I know that American kid’s name” “ Luuuke!” We laughed and played all night. By the end of the night, around 1, they were all asking why we were here, how long we were going to stay, and if we would come back again. I told them I’m sure we would be back soon. It was so cool to be able to make friends like that, through soccer, even though we didn’t have a common language between us. Walking back we couldn’t help but smile and think about how soccer transcends language, culture, and national borders. I can’t help but dream about spreading the Gospel through soccer later this semester, in Columbia, and maybe after school…

Logan