Thursday, June 27, 2013

School level special games fail to serve their purpose



KATHMANDU, JUN 28 -
Standing on the top podium, Daya Narayan Chaudhary could hardly hide his smile as his friends and teachers captured those moments on their cameras.
Chaudhary, representing Bhairahawa Bal Higher Secondary School, won a gold medal in the boys’400 metre race and a silver in long jump to emerge as one of the outstanding athletes at the 18th School Level Special Sports at the Dashrath stadium last week.
But his talent extends much beyond the running track. He was a key member of the Rupandehi cricket team that lifted that lifted the National Deaf Cricket Championship a few months back. Winning the championship, he confesses, was the happiest moment of his life.
“I showed all the photographs, newspaper clippings and trophies to all my family and friends,” Chaudhary, wearing an orange shirt of Rupandehi cricket team, explains in sign language, conveyed by his headmaster Khaga Raj Pandey.
Chaudhary comes from a poor family in Jwathi-6 of Nawalparasi district.  His father is the family’s sole bread winner who supports the family of 10 by tilling the rich people’s land in the farming season. He sells fruits and vegetables on a push cart during the off-season. His mother is a sickly graying housewife, crippled by the severe asthma.
But Chaudhary glosses over the gloomy picture, exuding confidence that he will one day change his family’s fortune by excelling in sports .
Having established himself as a key member of the deaf cricket team, the medium pacer and reliable middle order batsman says, “I want to emerge as a match-winning all rounder.”
Chaudhary is not alone at the school event to nurture dreams of turning around his family fortune.
Kopila Kumal won the girls’ 100m and 200m races only to return with bruised feet. She had swollen heels and ruptured her soles after running bare foot.
“My feet burns and my back aches,” 17-year-old Kumal bemoans, limping and gasping for breath.
“I did buy a pair of comfortable shoes before the tournament. But I gave them to my mother, and the ones I have now are really tight,” she says. It is Kumal’s second participation in the event; she won the girls’ 100m race last year.
Unlike Chaudhary, she has no plan of extending her sporting career. She has the other priority in life: to be an exemplary school teacher from her community.
“In our community, girls are rarely allowed to go to school,” says the 17-year-old, adding that he had joined school much later, at nine years of age in her native Gorkha.
Kumal, who represents the Dalit community, feels privileged to have overcome the social barrier and attended the school. She studies at Jeevan Jyoti Higher Secondary School.
“Now, I want to contribute and advocate for the girls’ education in our community by becoming a good school teacher,” declares a resolute Kumal, who was born with a spinal cord disability.   Her six-member family does not have a house and is taking shelter in an abandoned crumpling temporary house. Her father is a construction worker and mother is a farmer, tilling other’s land.
Despite being physically challenged, she has been supporting her family working as a domestic help since she was 11.
For her, lending hands to the family always takes precedence over the sporting career. “I don’t want to take any chance with my life because I cannot afford to do so,” she says.
While athletes like Kumal may have other priorities in life, the Special Sports Championship could have inculcate belief in many of the 302 participants-93 blind, 107 physically challenged and 102 deaf-that they have just as much potential as others.
But many observers are apprehensive about the event serving its true purpose, with hardly any encouragement for those athletes.
However, chief of the event organising committee Indra Bahadur Thing blames the conflict at the Paralympics Committee and the government apathy for the poor planning and organisation of the event.
According to him, the budget for the event has been reduced to Rs 120,000 from Rs 150,000.
“National Sports Council and sports associations should come up with programmes to promote special sports athletes,” Thing says

No comments:

Post a Comment