Wukro, day 10, survival athletes

Like every day, today we trained from 7:00 to 8:30. Leire Balerdi, one of the 3 med students that we have in the mission and a player from Añorga, has been accompanying us for a few days now. She will take over once we return to Bilbao on Sunday. We think it is important that they continue with these work dynamics, so with her we are assured of that continuity for at least another 2 weeks.

As soon as training was over Abba Gebre took us to the place where the Wukro athletes train. Until now we had not coincided with them because they had been competing away from the city. The coach invited us to participate in the session (they were almost done), so we had a 12-minutes series with the group of girls, running coordination-technique and stretching exercises. Afterwards we had a very interesting chat with him on the way of life and the success of Ethiopian long-distance runners. We could highlight many things about this conversation but we will stay with one of the factors that for us is most important and that is that they run to support their families, in other words, pure survival.

It surprised us to learn that they only train four days, and when we asked about that he responded ‘it would be ideal to hold double sessions but with their lack of food and nutrition they wouldn’t be able to endure it’.

In the evening we went to visit the athletics track that is under construction. On the way we passed the Wukro River where we saw how youngsters from the city were bathing in muddy water, (as you can see in the photo). Once we arrived at the track we realized that the project was halted due to a lack of funds and the only thing we were able to see was the shape of the track, because nothing else is finished.

On our return, after running into several youngsters from the city, we realized that in addition to Barça and Real Madrid they also know how to say ATHLETIC!