Day 14

It is Super Bowl Sunday, and based on my experience here, I think the announcement that 100 million people around the world are watching is hyperbole. I asked a couple locals here, and they didn’t even know what I was talking about. I have no idea what happened, so I guess life can go on even if you don’t know which ad Pepsi spent a billion dollars on.

I was wiped out today – we all had a terrible night’s sleep. There was a lot of noise, the kids are starting to get swarmed by mosquitoes in bed, and we all got less than 5 hours sleep. This translated into Benjamin falling asleep on the couch this morning, Lane falling asleep at the table this afternoon, and Amy going to bed before me. Oh yeah, I slept much of the afternoon, between drawing and reading White Fang again.

Anna Maria came over and made coco pollo. It was very good, and the whole family got to pepper her with questions, which Amy had to translate both ways since Anna Maria doesn’t speak English.

CURRENT READING: “Call of the Wild,” and “White Fang,” a collection with a biography of Jack London.

I’ve been reading Jack London these past days – I read “Call of the Wild” to Lane and Benjamin and, remembering how I worshiped those books as a boy, I dove right into “White Fang.” So maybe I’m just in that frame of mind, that constant evaluation of everything being seen as life vs. death, but today seemed to be a Jack London day.

Earlier was okay – we went to the all-inclusive, looked for Caesar the IT guy, were told he’s on vacation, and went to the pool for awhile instead. I came home early, inked a cartoon, and prepared for the rest of the week.

I left for the 1 mile walk to the soccer game, Monday night edition. I had had such a wonderful time on Friday that I was really looking forward to tonight. On the way I saw a dog run across the road ahead. Then I heard a thump, as a second dog who was chasing it was directly hit by an SUV. I’d say a speeding SUV, but everyone drives so fast here – motorcycles, cars, buses, trucks – that speeding is just a relative term. Fortunately, the dog was dead instantly. The SUV didn’t stop. A woman ran out, and looked at the dog, while a pool of blood grew around its head. She didn’t seem upset, just checking on the dog. I asked a guy working on a house across the road if “perro morte?” he said si. Cars kept on flying by, barely avoiding this dog body and woman standing over it in the middle of the road.

When I got to the soccer game, I was early. People started trickling in, and before I knew it a game was started. They mark the field by goals – two sticks placed apart – and the distance between each set of goals is decided by the number of people playing. As more people showed up, the goals got farther and farther apart, and at one point we actually made the field wider. I started out well, actually making a goal on the smallest field of the evening, but quickly morphed into a basket of mistakes. I whiffed on a couple balls, I ran into a couple people, I even made a sliding tackle after being beaten by someone, who angrily let me know that sliding tackles aren’t done in this game. Even though I know it wasn’t the case, I felt that my play cast an ugly tint to the game – that because I was playing badly and overcompensating with aggression, everyone else was following my lead, and the game became very physical. A couple collisions occurred and, after one between what I think was a Dominican player (he was Haitian) and an Italian player, they started exchanging words and shoving each other. All of a sudden the Haitian player punched the other guy, and pandemonium broke out. Another Haitian player flew in, punching and kicking, and the whole field came alive with people either facing off or trying to prevent others from facing off. As the original combatants were separated, somebody came flying through and got a punch in, starting everything off again. While peace was attempting to rear its ugly head, one of the Haitian players grabbed one of the stick goals, and smacked somebody across the back. This caused one of the older Italian players to go ballistic, and he tried to fight through several people to get to the stick-swinging guy. The scary part here is that the stick-swinging guy would have killed the old Italian guy if they ever got face-to-face, but the old Italian guy was beyond reasoning, running around trying to pick up and fling bottles and rocks from around the field. A couple people kept on trying to contain him, but he had this amazing ability, as things were calming down, to throw verbal gasoline on the fire as, despite several languages being used on the field, “mother” and “fungu” seem pretty universal. At points it looked like the fight might continue outside of the field, as a couple combatants got on their motorcycle and started heading out, looking like they were chasing each other, only to (smartly, I think) return to the field.

I asked one person I knew if this was a usual occurrence – he said no, it was the Italians’ fault. I am behind on my ethnic faults, and I thought HE was Italian, so I didn’t comment. Later I was talking with Jean, the man we rent from and one of the leaders of the game, and I asked him if this had ever occurred before. He said not this bad, and that the Italians had to win everything, and that made this so bad. To add to my ethnic faulting library, he said that the Haitian guy would have killed the Italian guy, as Haitians are so much tougher and have been through so much more. I just thought he would have killed him because he was 20-something with 0 % body fat and the other guy was in his 60’s.

After everyone had filed away – I had hung around the field for awhile – I started walking home. On the way I saw an older female dog sniffing around the road where the dog that had gotten killed, his body on the other side of the road. A couple cars sped by and beeped to get the female dog to move. She finally made it to the other side, where she was sniffing the body as I walked past.