Friends of Your Scrumhalf Connection

While my journey as a blogger has been quite short lived (going on 2 years!), I have made more friends in this short time than I ever thought possible. One blog that I read on my Google Reader each week with excitement is Friends of Rwandan Rugby at http://friendsofrwandanrugby.blogspot.com/.

A few months ago I emailed Emma who runs the blog and asked her about the touch rugby pictures from a particular post. I was intrigued by the youth rugby players, their passion in this sport and most of all what Emma was doing in Rwanda! Here is what I received back from Emma:

I received your message through our blog site. Thanks for getting in touch! I have been playing rugby since 1996, and in 2001 I went to live in Rwanda to discover that NONE of my students had ever heard of the great game. This started lots of coaching sessions (as I couldn’t bear to imagine 2 years without playing, and the deprivation of the Rwandan youngsters!), and the establishment of a charity in the UK called Friends of Rwandan Rugby.

The pictures on the blog are of a Tag rugby tour we help last week. We work in conjunction with another charity called Tag Rugby Development Trust. 3 volunteers came from England, 1 employee from TRDT from Uganda and we worked with 3 Rwandan coaches. We taught 150 primary school kids, girls and boys, Tag, trained a teacher from each school and left them with all the equipment. We hope to run this again next year.

If you go back through the files of the blog, we also had a mini-girls 7s tournament. There is no officially organised league for girls in Rwanda but there are some die-hard girls out there loving it! Our organisation is working on establishing a league for them to participate in.

Hope this answers some of your questions, please feel free to contact me if you would like me to clarify anything.

Best wishes
Emma Rees
FoRR Trustee

Emma, thanks for writing and I hope you have a few more readers and supporters of your blog after this post! Keep on ruckin girl, your great work is appreciated!