A brief history of my life…as retold through World Cups

I’m not a football fan, that much is clear. I’ve just walked out of a bar showing the World Cup Final to a house devoid of a TV or even a radio. When I got up to leave the bar the score was Italy 1- France 1 and as I walked down the stairs, I heard the small crowd in the bar cheering. Someone must have scored but I didn’t turn back. I walked for a short distance through the more than usually deserted streets of Kigali until I found a taxi-moto (motorbike taxi), my preferred method of transport since I left the volunteer service and can afford it. In the ten minutes or so that it must have taken me to get the taxi and arrive back home, someone else must have scored. I heard another cheer rising from the bar near my place. But I didn’t stop to see what happened, I had other things on my mind. While waiting for my brochette(goat kebab) in the bar, I got to thinking about other World Cup Finals and where I was…physically and mentally.

1990
The first World Cup I clearly remember was 1990. I was fifteen and Ireland had qualified for the first time ever. The football fever that swept the nation had been building since Euro88, although I had fairly fuzzy memories of that, even at the time. As you might expect, I lived at home with my parents and my brother…my older sister having already flown the nest by then. I hung out with a bunch of kids from the neighbourhood most of whom were a year or two older than me, and were part of a church organised youth club. Not that this means much in Ireland, where most things were somehow involving the church. At least back then, I have no idea what its like now. The club was called the Pioneer Total Absence Youth Club and we spent most of our time figuring out how to get booze into the youth club organised discos.

I had a crush on a fella with the ridiculous nickname of Booboo, who naturally enough thought I was way too uncool to have anything to do with. Later that summer, I would have my first real kiss, discovering what passion really meant while on holiday visiting a childhood friend who had moved to another part of the country and all thoughts of Booboo quickly disappeared. Back then, all The Gang wanted to do was hang out at The Ledge, a secluded piece of cliff overlooking the whole of Ballyloughan Beach, drink cider and shandy and, if you’re me, attempt to smoke cigarettes. Thankfully, I never did get the hang of cigarettes. Someone must have had a stereo or a radio, or maybe both cause I remember listening to both matches and World Cup news, as well as endless repeats of GunsRoses Sweet Child of Mine. That song is still incredibly evocative of a summer which seemed to go on forever, where the sun always shinned and where the national pride and general optimism seemed to spill out of the mere domain of football and permeate everything. For a people who never seem too upbeat about anything, the summer of 1990 was a great time to be Irish.

I still remember listening to the end of final game (for the Irish) on the radio while on the way to work…and feeling the complete sense of anti-climax as we were eliminated in a penalty shoot-out against the Romanians. We was robbed, I tell you…robbed! The blow was somewhat softened by having been beaten by another underdog (Romania). And for all that furore, I still couldn’t tell you who won the final.

1994
That year is so much more loaded now, after a few years of living in Rwanda. Back then, Rwanda was a small blip on the international news radar, stuck between headlines on the violence in South Africa and the latest World Cup scores. I vaguely remember seeing some piece on the TV about bodies washing up in Uganda on the shores of Lake Victoria. Rwanda’s dead were piling so high, that they were literally flowing over the borders. Now I wonder if anyone at all in the country was thinking about football. I wonder if the Interahamwe or the Genocide regime leaders were watching the matches and getting drunk in some of Kigali’s international hotels…dribbling as Rome burnt?

During the summer of ’94, I was a barmaid in an Irish bar in Essex, at least the technically Essex but practically in the East End of London. My college boyfriend and first love had, for a number of years, taken summer jobs in London to support his studies. So, as I had an aunt in London and a thirst for anything new, I followed over with the intention of saving some money and travelling later on. I had been jobhunting for about a week, and had seen a bar looking for staff somewhere in central London. Later that day while out shopping in Ilford, the nearest large High Street to my aunt’s place, I passed a bar with the same name. The owners were northern Irish, the interview consisted of “Have to ever worked in a bar before?” (No) and “Are you Irish?” (Yes). And so it was that walked into the wrong bar in the wrong part of town and got the job anyway. I’m a great believer in fate or serendipity or whatever.

My boyfriend stayed with his grandparents in Hampton Hill (zone 6 West), I stayed in my Aunts place in Wanstead (zone 4 east). I worked in the bar with two alcoholic owners (one of whom was a Mason), two odd Scottish blokes (one of whom was a recovering alcoholic), one Irish lady who seemed to be going through a mid 30s crisis, one relatively normal English bloke (“Its not the money you earn here, it’s the money you save from working anti-social hours”, he used to say), and a selection of temporary staff like myself. I learned a lot about life…and the North London line train timetable.

We had a screen in the bar, but I didn’t see much of the World Cup matches as I was serving behind the bar and the place was always packed. Not that I minded much, I lived for my Sundays when I could make the long trek to Hampton Hill – the highlight of every week. I do remember that it was painfully hot that summer in London, and even more so behind the bar. We had to wait two weeks to get some fans behind the bar as apparently all the local shops had run out due to the high demand! At the end of the summer, I would go on the first of my many travels, an Interrail trip for a month, mostly in Italy and Greece with my best friend from childhood. I was eighteen and it was after this trip that I announced I would travel round the world one day. It was a decision which would shape the whole of my adult life to date.

1998
The strangest thing about the World Cup 1998 is how little I remember about it, given that I was in Ireland at the time and there must have been quite a fuss. I remember that there was quite a bit of absenteeism at work as I was working in my first “proper” full time job after finishing my Masters. I had finished my first degree in 1996, it was the very beginning of the DotCom boom in Ireland and unlike the vast majority of my classmates, I made the unusual decision to stay on at university for the Masters. After graduating, I made another usual decision to stay on in Galway rather than move to Dublin where all the real action was happening.

I was working in Nortel, a multinational Canadian telecoms giant and longtime big name in terms of employment in my native city. It was beginning to diversify from its manufacturing roots after being downsized and threatened with closure a few times during the 80s and early 90s. And having ridden out the storm of impending globalisation and outsourcing the espirit de corps in the plant (in those days it was still called a plant) was second to none. But the company as a whole was about to do battle on a completely different front – it was a voice telecoms company in a world that was turning digital. With a corporate structure that didn’t allow for easy communication and a human resource base that didn’t know its bridge from its router, something had to be done. And so the “Right Angle Turn” initiative was launched. Its aim: to bring Nortel’s manufacturing, management, staff and business processes kicking and screaming into the data revolution.

Straight out of university, I took a job in their software testing department – a career faux pas, I realise now, that has dogged my prospects ever since. But at the time, I didn’t mind much, I lived in the future where I would have enough money saved to finally take off on that Round the World trip I’d always dreamed of…and besides the people I worked with were the best, I’d finally moved out of home earlier that year and I was with a man that I thought I was going to marry. So what if my day-to-day work was an intellectual desert punctuated by a few paycheques? And that the highlight of my working week was the rehearsals for our drama group? I was beginning to learn that life is all about trade-offs. I was 23.

It would take me another year to save enough money to go on that trip. I left in June of 1999, I have never lived in Galway since. When I returned for a visit after a year and half of travels and of keeping an online travel journal (the kind of thing that would later be called a blog), I found out that every time I posted a new episode on my website, word would spread like wildfire and anyone who had known me would congregate over coffee to discuss my adventures. Strange how you can affect people in ways might never know about.

2002

I seem to remember people watching football at odd hours during the World Cup of 2002. Some of the people at the university in Switzerland where I had been studying had brought TVs into their offices. Possibly so they could easily check on the scores while supervising examinations. After a brief stint in Ireland at the beginning of 2001, I left for a year postgraduate study in Switzerland in Autumn of that year, just after my sister had her first child. Her daughter was premature and although I had tried to visit before I left, they were only admitting parents and grandparents to the ICU. I wondered why grandparents are seen as closer than aunts.

I was deep in study mode for my final exams when the World Cup rolled round, so I didn’t pay much attention. Going back to study after five years, and choosing to do it in a discipline different to my other degrees, proved more difficult than I had ever imagined and it was the first time in my life I ever got stressed about exams. It was horrible, but I survived however I’m drawing blank on what I did that summer after the World Cup and the exams. From time to time, I stumble on some black holes of memory like this. It disturbs me, which is possibly a reason why I write.

2006
It’s now 2006, and as I write this the remnants of this years World Cup final are audible throughout my middle class Rwandan neighbourhood. Given the number of cars parked in our street (dirt road of course), the next door neighbours must be having a party of some sort. But this is Rwanda, and I can barely hear them, except occasionally when someone must have scored. Unlike other years, the World Cup period seems to have come and gone in the blink of an eye. Is this a symptom of getting older? Or simply of not living in an overly consumerised society? I’ll opt for the latter.

About the only thing that made me notice it at all, was friends of mine kept disappearing after dinner to watch the matches in one of the handful of places in town that have large screens. People who I would never have counted as football fans are now glued to the World Cup. Luckily there are enough Americans around to keep me company. It seems many people here are supporting France, ever since Ghana got knocked out, on the grounds that most of the French team are really African anyway.


I work for the Government of Rwanda, I live with an eccentric English guy (Steve) and his crazy cat (Cat) and I’m not quite sure why I’m still here - in Rwanda that is, existential questions are put on hold for now. Although just before I went to the bar tonight, something reminded me of why its so difficult to leave. I was in the new fitness club and had just come out of the shower. It being World Cup Final night, no one else was there except a lady cleaning the floor. I sat on the bench and began to dry myself when the cleaning lady quietly offered me her flip flops and stood barefoot beside me. I didn’t need them, but it is just this kind of unthinking, unasked, wordless, reflex impulse toward kindness that keeps me around.

By the way, the cat is simply called Cat, as Steve chose to call it the Kinyarwanda word for genetics, which no one can remember let alone pronounce (I did mention he was eccentric!). He called her that because he thinks her mother and father were brother and sister. It reminds me of a song this ex-housemate of mine from Kerry used to sing “O, she was her own grandmother…yes she was…”, only I don’t think he was singing about cats. But I digress…

I live in a two story, three bedroom, semi detached house in an estate built in the mid 80s, where all the houses look the same (inside and out) much like you might find anywhere. But the floors are bare concrete, the beds have mosquito nets, the water regularly goes off for 3 days straight, the electricity is more expensive than you can dream and my trees house some of the loudest birds on earth. Its hard to believe I heading towards my third year here…longer than I was in Switzerland. I never planned it like this, but I’m beginning to learn that life rarely goes to plan, and when it does, it can be kinda dull. I recently met someone I could spent the rest of my life with, but have no clue if this is even slightly possible…or if he has decided similiarly. I can’t wait to find out, but I don’t want to rush either. It feels like reading a really good suspense novel, you want to find out the ending but at the same time you don’t want to finish reading the book. And it drives you the very best kind of crazy.

But this isn’t the only thing on my mind, my future on all fronts is uncertain. My work contract ends here in January but I’m not too worried, I’ve learned that things will work out when they need to. My life is full of richness and loneliness, joy and pain, frustration and satisfaction...perhaps I could just say my life is full and I’m waiting to write the next chapter.

At the next World Cup, it will have been two decades since my first World Cup memories. 20 years…I can’t even digest that figure, I’m sure I’m too young to have been an adult that long.

And I still don’t know who won…