Winner Winner Chicken Dinner...

How does one celebrate the Official FIFA Football for Hope Centre Opening?  Why by slaughtering chickens of course… No, I’m not kidding…

Ever since my first day at Kick4Life there has been non-stop work for the Centre Opening.  Like I stated in earlier posts, K4L was selected by FIFA to be a Football for Hope Centre in their campaign of “20 centres by 2010” from the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.  Saturday was the big day.  It went amazing—smooth, on time (which never happens here in Africa), and fun.  We celebrated with a football tournament on our new 5v5 turf pitch where local schools came to play for orphanages around Lesotho, our curriculum going on in the background, and celebrity guests (former South African professional football players) that I didn’t know who the heck they were, but hey, everyone was going crazy.  All in all, it was a success.

Doug, a former intern, left on Monday, but did want to leave Africa until he felt he had the whole African experience.  He talked for a while with the staff how he wanted to kill a chicken and then eat it, I thought it was just going to be one of his crazy talk that never happens…I was wrong.  On Saturday, a staff member, Stango, came to the opening with a box of two chickens.  After the opening, (and before the after party) I witnessed a murder.  Now, I’m not a vegetarian, on the contrary, I love meat, so how can I justify that they are evil for killing chickens, when I ate them.  They have to die somehow; I just don’t want to do the killing.  I half watched, half covered my eyes, but still managed to document the event.  It was insane!  Everyone sort of knows that they move when you cut their head off, but I didn’t know they moved that much!  After the beheading, I looked away for one second, then BOOM all of a sudden, the chicken was running under the bowl!  I started freaking out; it’s probably the weirdest thing I have ever seen.  We ate them on Sunday night, and boy were they delicious.  It was like Whole Foods organic, free-roam chickens, but with a little aftertaste of Lord of the Flies brutality.

My co-workers keep telling me I’m going to kill one before I leave, I say heck to the no.  I have no problem with someone doing the killing, I just don’t think I have the heart to take a life, even if it’s only a chicken.

TTFN:

Peace, Love, and Did I mention the boys named them Emma and Meg? Rude.