World Cup

Sports events bring out complicated emotions for me. Sports were a huge part of my life growing up: soccer, swimming, then cross country and track. I have a huge respect for the way sport can challenge, provide an outlet and teach collaboration and perseverance. This is constantly in evidence here (although sadly mostly for boys) with daily pickup games of soccer, baseball and volleyball in the streets or on one of several small concrete courts around town keeping kids out of trouble (or more out of trouble than they would have been otherwise). On the other hand, I find allegiances to teams and statistics and big money and ridiculous sexism sort of against the ethos of what sport means for me. All these big ideas are also just a cover for the fact that I'm such a spaz that I can't possibly sit still for an entire game of nearly anything if it's not live.

Given all this, the World Cup football fever that hit Nicaragua provided an interesting time for me.
For about a month, any midday walks were accompanied by the sounds of far- off cheering wafting between houses.  I suppose this is what it was like when television was first invented: everyone tuned to the same station, living the same moment.

I approached the World Cup with my usual faker's approach to things that are slightly out of my league (no pun intended) or my interest level, a skill that I have honed during Peace Corps. But I was swept away. Due to school winding down for the semester with lots of cancellations, I watched a lot of the games with Nica friends and fellow PCVs and got a lot more drawn into it than I expected. When it got down to the last few games, I actually wanted to go watch the games, and not just to be with other people.

A side benefit was that for the first time in my service, I had an actual topic to talk about to men, even if it meant I had to bs knowing players names and the outcomes of past world cups. I can only imagine how different things would be if World Cups were a permanent thing. Anytime someone would ask me yet again if I have a boyfriend, married, etc., I could totally just deflect with "Did you see the _________vs. _________ game? Wasn't it crazy?" Sigh.

Of course, the World Cup, like an global sporting event, is representative of so much of the good and bad in the world. The FIFA #Say No to Racism posters plastered around the stadium that apparently didn't want us to say no to the kind of institutionalized racism or classism that enabled the very venues for the event. The irony of teams made up of a rainbow spectrum of immigrants who wouldn't normally be welcomed but for their athletic ability. The narrow sliver of the world that was actually able to "come together as one". The massive outpourings of emotion for ultimately meaningless events that would change the world if they were directed at anything that actually mattered like education, climate change, poverty, environmental destruction.

But after all, it's only a game. It solves nothing, but maybe it brings us a little closer together, even if only in shared memories and maybe that's enough to hope for.