Soccer final (and cooking)

Today was my cooking day. Volunteers take turns two at a time to cook dinner for everyone. It is served promptly at 6 PM so that the night survey team can get ready. Since today I wanted to go to see the soccer final, I started cooking early and left my friendly 18-year old sous chef to serve it and cook the rice (quite a coup on my part: escape so I didn’t have to bite my nails and watch to see whether people pushed their food around their plates while trying to swallow some nutrition for the long night ahead).

The soccer final was exciting! I got to ride down with the team in a commandeered local 14-seater bus with at least 20 people in it. The music was blaring and we had to stop off and pick up more players. This is how its done: the bus stops half in the road, and 1-2 people start calling to the house up the hill. No response. So yelling and teasing starts, and finally a kid gets out and makes his way up through the banana trees, but usually by this time the player is on his way down with his kit. Then the whole van has to be re-jigged to fit everyone in. Repeat. By the end I felt guilty because it felt like my camera bag was taking up enough space for another person. Ah well, at this point I’m pretty much the team photographer, so I gotta go in the team bus, man!

The game was close and exciting. I was conflicted with trying to take good photographs and at the same wanting to get involved in the action. If only all dilemmas in life were this easy – eye in viewfinder vs. eye on action! Sadly, we lost the game 2-3 as the other team got 2 early goals that they capitalized on.