There We Were.....In Front Of The Crowd

I love this picture of Joe with the crowd filling in behind him. We hunkered down in that spot for about an hour before anyone else came onto the field.....I mean no other photographers, reporters of any kind, ball boys, team workers, field workers, refs, no one but Joe and Me and about 1000 Police in riot gear. They were on the field and 1000's more were dispersed everywhere around the stadium. We just sat there where Joe is seated watching the crowd around the stadium.

What we saw as the nearly 65,000 men....like maybe 3-4 women were in the crowd meaning they were as scarce as we Mondeli (white people).......came into the stadium was they would try and get the best seats and that caused plenty of fights breaking out all over. We watched a couple of small riots as Police would be beating some people with their batons......scary! We watched some guy being chased by a group of people from near the top of the stadium's 2nd deck, chasing him down to the railing of the deck. You could tell he was scared and fearful and he flipped over the rail and was dangling from the 2nd deck rail for like 10 seconds......then he just let go and fell into the lower section. We never did see if he got up or what happened to him.

It was a very bizarre time....we had people throwing stuff at us to get our attention, we had some firecrackers pop off right next to us that were thrown by the crowd behind us. At one point I said to Joe "are you praying?" He affirmed "I sure am", and to be very honest we were pretty stressed and frightened. But as the teams came on and as the game got going....it was like we didn't exist to the fans.

I have heard from many people that we were on TV.....the game was televised all over Congo and they zoomed in on the mondeli numerous times I guess.....happy that we were in attendance taking pictures for the TASOK News!