Beauchamp: The Beautiful Champions

Dear Blancs,

From this point on, whenever I say "football," I'm referring to soccer.

Love,
Ti Blanc

So I have spent the last couple of days with my group in Beauchamp--a skip and a jump and a 2 1/2 hour TapTap ride away from St. Louis.  When we got there, most people were pooped and needed a rest, but a couple of them were up for some fun.

Just in case you don't know what I mean by "fun," here's some Haitian math for you:

football + Haitian boys + muddy field = fun

So the four blancs and a bunch of Haitian boys played football for awhile.  I have some pretty intense bruises and cuts and scrapes as souvenirs... one of the buttons on my anklet even broke.  I do have to say, we played pretty well for blancs.  I mean, Haitians come out of the womb playing football.  I even earned myself a sweet-awesome nickname: Ti Blanc (Little White).

I did have a rather new experience that first night in Beauchamp.  They were waiting for more water to come in, so all we had was Gatoraid to drink.  After a couple of hours of playing football in the sun, I needed some water.  When in your life have you ever needed water and it wasn't at your fingertips?  All of you need to go thank your fancy refrigerator water system thingies right now.  Send it a thank you card or something.  If fact, you can magnet the card right up there next to the report cards and pictures.

Anyway, moving on.  The past couple of days have been basically a combination of Bible lessons (VBS) and football with the kids in Beauchamp.

Favorite VBS moment: My team did a "kiddie" version of the Everything skit.  (Look it up on YouTube.  I'd post a link, but the internet here is not YouTube-friendly right now...)  Instead of drinking and body image and suicide, they did cheating and stealing and bullying, etc.  It was really cute.  I would love to steal it for the kids at church back home or something.

Favorite Football moment: We all went down to the big football field while it was raining to play and a bunch of Haitians of all ages (around 7-25) came to play also.  We had a huge game going.  Half the field was mud, so people were slipping all over the place.  It was hilarious.  Eventually, the game digressed into a crazy mudball fight!  We may have not been able to understand each others' languages, but whenever someon slipped and fell into the mud or got a mudball to the face, we all laughed.

Creole lesson: Ri se yon bagay universel. = Laughter is universal.

*Disclaimer:  Beauchamp doesn't actually mean Beautiful Champions.  I was trying to be witty.

Love you guys!
Ti Blanc