Running the world...

Thursday, 16 Oct 2008

Written by jannovdl

This weekend the Millenium Development Goals (MDG) Race was held in Lusaka, Zambia. As starry-eyed idealists me and my intern buddy veron are present. We signed up for the ‘health walk’. But the actual race is about the MDG-run. Yesterday night late the idea of participating in a maize-suit to represent WFP was born. Veron would make the suit, I would run in it.

As veron didn’t had the suit the following morning, I was luckily excluded from the race. With my eyes barely open, and the sun already climbing high up in the sky, we went to the MDG-race. It appeared that only one employee of WFP dared to run the real race, the rest just did the health walk. The one brave man was our driver which we call ‘teeth’, he is the most sweet of all the drivers that drove us and for a second I flirted with the though of accompanying him. But 2 Kilometres in the heat of the day, that’s half a marathon… In a courageous moment I step in line to sign of for the run. A moment later I had a number on my back and I felt like participating in the dutch show ‘try before you die’. On the way to the start ‘teeth’ posed me the question ‘you’re a runner, aren’t you?’ which I had to answer an embarrassing ‘no’.