By Robbie Hughes | International Partner and Volunteer
I was thirteen years old. I did not speak a word of French. I had a suitcase full of karate gis and an idea that felt simple enough at the time: teach these boys how to defend themselves.
I walked into the open sand field at Maison de la Gare on that first morning, not entirely sure what I was doing, and I just started moving. I ran through the forms I knew. A handful of boys drifted over and watched. Then a few of them started copying me. No common language required.
The next day, at the same time, a few dozen showed up.
The day after that, more. By day four, we had run out of gis. We had packed over a hundred of them. I was thirteen years old, and by the end of the first week, a hundred talibé boys were standing in a sand field in their white uniforms, waiting for me to begin.
I have thought about that moment many times over the past ten years. There is something in it that still stops me. Not the logistics of it, though that is remarkable enough. What stops me is what it revealed about karate itself — what it carries across every border (and into every dojo) you bring it to.
These are talibé boys. They are sent to Quranic schools, their daaras, by families who often believe they are giving their children an education. What many receive instead is forced labor. They sleep in open concrete rooms, sixty boys packed shoulder to shoulder. Their days are measured by how full their begging bowls are by the time they are allowed to stop. The bowl is often the only thing they can call their own. It was given to them by the marabout who controls every hour of their lives. They do not choose when to wake, where to go, or when to eat.
But at ten o'clock in the morning, a few days a week, they chose to come to us.
That was the first surprise: that they came at all, and that they kept coming. The second surprise took longer to understand. I had gone to Senegal thinking about self-defense. A boy who is hit should know how to protect himself. That was the original idea, and it was not wrong. But it was small. It turned out to be the least important thing we gave them.
What karate actually gave these boys was structure. Not rules imposed from above, but a framework they could step inside and feel held by. A sequence of movements that rewarded attention and repetition. A practice that was theirs, that no marabout had assigned them. In a life defined almost entirely by what others demanded of them, here was something that existed for their own benefit, at no one's command but their own.
And then there was the gi.
I want to be precise about this, because I think it matters more than anything else I could tell you about the program. These boys do not have multiple sets of clothing. Some have barely one. They sleep on concrete. They train in sand. Breakfalls, push-ups, sparring — all of it in a field that covers everything in dust by the end of the first drill. Keeping a white gi white in those conditions is, by any practical measure, nearly impossible.
They keep them immaculately.
Week after week. Year after year. I have no full explanation for it except that the gi was theirs. Not issued by the marabout. Not a requirement of the daara. It was the one thing in their lives that belonged to them because they had earned it, and they treated it accordingly. I have seen a lot of what poverty does to dignity. I have also seen, in that field, what it looks like when dignity refuses to yield.
The tournaments came later, and they brought something else we had not anticipated: the experience of winning. Not winning against life, not winning some abstract battle against their circumstances, but winning something concrete. A match. A kata. A cup with a name on it. These boys, who are told every day by the logic of their situation that they are worth very little, got to stand on a mat in front of a crowd and be declared the best. Previous champions now hand the cups to the new ones. That tradition started last year. I think it may be the best thing we have ever done.
I hope to soon make my first trip back since our ten-year anniversary. I am not thirteen anymore, and the program is not what it was in 2015. It is structured now, with belts, grading ceremonies, and tournaments and a decade of champions. But what it actually is, what it has always been, is this: somewhere on those mats, a boy full of confidence who once slept on concrete is teaching a younger one how to fall without being afraid of the ground. Karate is a language. It turns out…no translation is required at all.
Links:
By El Hadj Abdou SY | Responsable des Communications, Maison de la Gare
By Sonia LeRoy and Sulayman Ba | International Partner; Maison de la Gare Staff
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