Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Soccer In The Campo


I tagged along with the youth soccer teams on a trip out of town.  I went to watch them play and to kick the ball around a little because I don’t get to do that as much as I’d like.  There were two teams and they were planning on playing each other.  We had to leave town because our soccer field is mostly underwater due to the flooding of the lake.  After a good rainstorm I wouldn’t even call it a soccer field anymore, I would just call it the shallow end of the lake.  The older teams, for the most part, can handle playing in the shallow end of the lake.  It’s not perfect but they play the best they can.  They’re much taller but they still have trouble slogging through the mess.  When they kick the ball it never rolls because the whole field is submerged.  But these tiny kids can hardly even walk through it.  So an away game was planned.
I showed up at the health center early on a clear Saturday morning, ready to leave.  I was one of the first few to arrive so I waited around as more and more people showed up.  Eventually, when everyone was there, we took up the entire sidewalk and spilled into the street.  In front of the health center were 34 children, two coaches, myself, a driver and his buddy, and one white pickup truck with a busted battery.
            We smashed the kids into the back, all of them.  There’s no such thing as an over-crowded vehicle, even when children are involved.  The health center is on a hillside so we gave the truck a nudge, it rolled down towards the lake, the driver popped the clutch and turned the key, and they disappeared around a corner.  Thank God, I thought.  There was not an inch of free space in the back of that thing.  I was glad not to be in it.
            “So how are we getting there?”  I asked cautiously.  Just then the truck swung around the corner to pick us up.  So we got in the truck too…sort of.  We got mostly in the truck.  I only had a leg sticking out but both of the coaches rode the 40 minutes standing on the bumper and holding onto the frame.  We went to some far-off community down a long, mucky, bumpy road.  We got off and the kids played soccer for two hours.  It rained on and off, sometimes heavy.  The field got muddy but held up nonetheless.  The kids were having lots of fun.
 The owner eventually kicked us off on account of tearing up the wet grass but no one seemed to mind because we were wrapping things up anyway.  As the kids rinsed the mud off in some large puddles, the driver changed one of the tires.  We had picked up a nail or something along the dirt road.
With the tire changed, the driver attempted to start the truck.  But trucks with broken batteries don’t start, even if they do have four good wheels.  The only way to get it going was to give it some forward momentum and pop the clutch.  But a muddy, flat, deeply rutted road isn’t the ideal place to push a truck.  A bunch of the kids, 25 or so, surrounded the truck on all sides and grabbed hold.  Their cleats sunk into the mud, their legs slipped out from under them, but somehow they were able to get the truck rolling.  It didn’t work on the first attempt.  They probably pushed the truck about a quarter mile before finding a smooth patch.  It finally rumbled to life.  I followed along the entire way snapping photos.  We squeezed back in and headed home.
The kids were rowdy, worked up from the game.  During the trip they played a game that consisted of slapping each other on the head and face then blaming it on the person next to them.  On our way back we ran over someone’s rooster.  Para la sopa!” everyone yelled in unison.  Rooster soup.