Heat Stroke...my first!

Question: What do you get when a 50+ year old man with white hair plays soccer for 40 minutes under the noontime equatorial sun in 40 degree heat.

Answer: Heat Stroke with a vengeance.

For the past three weeks at school, I had been promising the kids at our morning assemblies that as soon as we get a rainless Friday, the teachers would challenge them to an impromptu soccer game. Today was the first Friday that it didn’t rain…so I had to walk my talk, and of course, the kids would have any part of  “its too hot to be standing out in that sun” lame excuse for not playing.

Of course, as expected, all the women staff declined to play for the usual reason sore this and sore that…lets just say that our women let us down. They probably would all have played like girls anyways.

So this left us men to battle the kids on our own. Being only 4 men on staff, and 1 of them had to be referee, I succeeded in recruiting 4 of the maintenance guys to join us. I immediately knew that this was a good decision on my part when, after asking them if they wanted to play at 11AM, they all showed up at centre field at 11:05,  all geared up and dressed in these impressive soccer uniforms. I took this to mean that,

a) obviously, they had already played before;

b) obviously, they kind of suspected that I would be asking them to play;

c) obviously, they were pretty adept at playing soccer, otherwise they would not be all geared up with enough soccer paraphernalia to play in the FIFA World Cup. 

We were in business.

The game went well and we started off by playing against the Nursery/Kindergarten little kids. We won that first game, but that’s because Nelda, our cute-as-a-button-3-year-old-space-cadet scored in his own goal.  Then it was the Primary section’s turn. The score ended up being 0-0, even though we had tried hard to let them score in our net. As we went up in grades, competition and competiveness stiffened. By the time we got to the high school kids…suffice to say that we were not playing games anymore, it became a battle. Soccer is serious business over here.

I began to suspect that I was in trouble when my vision got blurry (not a good thing when you play defence…).  I was drenched in sweat from head to toe. Could this 40 degree heat and this sun be getting to me? Duh….  I had a decision to make: leave the field to find shade and water and consequently, let my team down, or, continue playing and die of heat exhaustion. I left the field.

Got home Friday afternoon, went to bed, and slept, out-cold (no pun intended) for four solid hours, except for the occasional Florence/Madeleine/Nightingale visits interrupting my sleep with demands that I drink some water. I complied.

Lesson of the day : A white haired man in his fifties does not stand in the African equatorial sun for 45 minutes without a hat, and expect to live to tell about it.