A Soccer Game in Site

Today, I watched Besiko (my district) play Mirono (another district) in soccer. It was more exciting than sitting in my hammock and sweating, which I’ve done a lot of in the past week and it was a good place to mingle with the gente (literally, horse poop) and scope the caliber of play on the Besiko team (low).

The coach, Ruben, approached me before the game and asked me to be the referee. Goal 2 of Peace Corps is to teach your community about American culture; as such I informed Ruben that, as an American, I know none of the rules (except that neither team is allowed to score more than 3 goals, because that would be too exciting). This was a good decision because fans here are like fans everywhere and spend 97%* of their time yelling at the ref and preemptively sending hate mail to his home.

The game started an hour late (also known as, “right on time”) and was less exciting than the World Cup but more exciting than staring at the back of your hand for 90 minutes. It smelled like horse poop and on the field there were large piles of, well, horse poop.

It was also cloudy, so I didn’t sweat standing still, which was a nice change. It was still hot though, but this did not stop Coach Ruben from donning a trench coat. He claimed it would scare the other team. I realized then that while, in the last six months, I have acclimated to the heat here, I doubt I will ever trench-coat-acclimate.

We scored early with a series of skillful passes. If we had passed that skillfully the rest of the game, we would have scored at least 27 goals, but adhering to the Laws of Soccer, we didn’t score again. Mirono scored late in the 2^nd half, dutifully tying the game and proving once again why it will never be popular in America. I asked Ruben if there would be overtime or penalty kicks. He said no. I said, “This is why Americans don’t like soccer.”

Then I stepped in horse poop.

*Source: The International Footballing Association of Footballers of the World