“You got it?” Art’s voice rang out.
“Got it!” I called back, celebratory.
“Good,” he responded. “Get the beak.”
I reached down and grabbed the top of the parrot’s beak. Without the beak, we had no evidence that we had killed the parrot. Without the evidence, we couldn’t get paid for killing it.
With a quick cut from my pocket knife the beak came off, and I took the top half. I brought it back to my brother, handing it up to him on the horse. The horse whinnied and snorted, stamping its foot. It wanted to move. And we wanted to hunt, so my brother quickly dropped the beak into the shoe-polish container, and I climbed back up onto the horse, swinging up easily and lightly.
The hunt continued, each parrot’s beak worth seven cents from the mayor of our village. A single hunting trip could net 10 to 15 parrots, more money than we could earn from any other job we could find.
* * *
Right from a young age my life included working on the farm. Chores were common and included bringing the cows in at the end of the day, watering the horses, feeding them, collecting eggs from the chickens, cleaning the yard, weeding and raking. Making money was no simple task. In order for my parents to get us gifts for Christmas they had to sell eggs outside of the market, egg by egg, penny by penny. Since our society dealt only in a line of credit (and ours was so bad they couldn’t buy gifts), this was the only way for them to buy us a gift. They’d work at it the entire year, earning enough from eggs that we didn’t get to eat for a simple gift.
Just like any other kid, I had a wish every year for Christmas. But unlike most kids, my only wish was the same every year: a soccer ball. It’s not that I didn’t get one—I sometimes did—but I used it so much that I would need a new one by the next Christmas. The balls were simple and plain, and they’d bounce in every direction off the mud clumps that decorated the landscape.
On our property was a large bottle tree, with gigantic needle-like points coming off of plum-sized protrusions. One bounce off the bottle tree and a ball was popped like a balloon.
But the game didn’t end there. With no other access to sporting equipment, we’d open the ball up and patch the rubber bladder with bike patches, then close the material up and sew it together. It was probably the only time in my life I’d ever be caught with a sewing needle in my hand. Given to us at Christmas, the soccer ball would become a project throughout the year. Patched up over and over, we could often stretch out its tough existence until the next Christmas, when we’d hopefully have a new one.
My brother is three years older than I am, so by the time I was getting seriously into playing soccer he was already in junior high school, living in a dorm a significantly distant 9 km away. I was the youngest of ten kids (nine made it through infancy), and my brother was the second youngest. Older than him were my sisters, leading to my far-older brother at the top of the food chain, who had gotten married when I was six and was subsequently gone from home.
Some of my soccer playing was done with my two friends, Jacob and Abram, but they were nowhere near as enthusiastic about sports as I was. Given their lack of interest, it wasn’t long before my skills distanced me from them. With only 20 homes in our village, there weren’t too many other kids to play with.
Our farm was on the edge of the village, and some 500 m away was a native reserve. There were somewhere between 50 and 100 people living in the reserve, and their livelihood came mostly from begging or being employed by the farmers in return for food and (possibly) some money. They were quite frequently dependent on handouts or job opportunities, and the faith-based nature of our village led to us seeing them as poor whom we could help. Given that they were South Americans, soccer was something they were very interested in.
Finally I had someone to play with.
While we would have considered ourselves far from wealthy, I was the only one around with a soccer ball. Over time I had cut some small trees and built soccer goals, and we’d set them up on the cow pasture behind our farm. Right there, in my own backyard, we had our own official soccer field. Saturdays or Sundays were game days, and I’d wake up in the morning with an itch in my legs to get out onto the field, test my skills out against the natives, and have a real game. The size of the scrimmage would vary from day to day, though it usually hung around the 4 to 10 players range. It didn’t matter to me, as long as I was playing soccer.
It was the closest I would come to a real game of soccer for a long time.
* * *
Once or twice a week wasn’t enough. I wasn’t a cocky kid, but I had a drive to succeed like no one else I knew. This meant that I needed to practice, even if no one else wanted to. Since my brother was off at school (sometimes home on the weekends) and my friends weren’t as interested in the activity as I was, it meant I needed to come up with something on my own, a way to train and get better without relying on anyone else. If I had wanted to play forward or defense it would have been easier, but I always found myself gravitating to the net. You can dribble, deke and shoot without anyone else on the field. But it’s hard to make saves if all the ball does is sit on the ground.
Our homestead was four buildings: two barns, the house and the kitchen (separate from the house). The kitchen was the only building with any type of heating at all—it had a simple woodstove. While it didn’t often go below zero Celsius in the winter, zero Celsius is very different when all you have to do is run from your car to the house than when you have to cover yourself up under a blanket and go to sleep in a house that isn’t remotely insulated. That combined with a dry and strong wind that whips into the house and brings with it sand and dust can make for a very uncomfortable winter.
While the barns were often built with wood planks, the homes and kitchens were built out of mud bricks with straw in between. The mud would be packed into a brick form, let dry and pulled out once it was dry enough to retain its shape. Then it would finish hardening out of the form. Anyone who’s stood in a mud field knows well enough that with rain mud turns soft and gooey, completely losing its shape. To combat this we would coat the bricks with a chalk-like paint to seal them. This meant the rain stayed out (mostly) and the houses would stand for longer. This paint was white, and the chickens had it in their minds that this was food. They would peck away at the white chalk until they’d thoroughly weakened the house, so everyone resorted to mixing soot into the bricks along the bottom of the house, preventing the chickens from pecking at it. The roofs were made of tin or aluminum, but it was the walls and not the roofs that I was interested in.
Patterned by design and weathered over the years, the walls were often irregular and unpredictable—perfect for a goalie. To hone my ability I would kick the ball against the walls. The ball bounced back at me to the left, right, up, down—I could never predict it. Over time I got better and better at reacting to the bounces and I could stop it from flying past me. I had to be sharp, ready on my toes to make the catch or block. Depending on how close I stood I’d have to do more than step—I’d have to resort to lunging and diving after the ball, scraping and bruising my legs, sides, hips, shoulders and arms countless times.
But it was all worth it to stop the ball from getting past me.
And it was preparation for a hobby and career of using my physical gifts and strengths to reach others with God’s good news.
It was on that mud yard behind the barn, flying through the air, that I developed a saying I’ve become known for (among my family, at least): If you can touch it, you can catch it. (The catchphrase worked great when my kids were small, but eventually they caught on and realized they could repeat it to me mockingly when I dropped anything thrown at me.)
A soccer goalie only faces a handful of shots in a single game, so controlling the shot is of the utmost importance. If you don’t hang on to it, the ball bounces right back out into the 18-yard box. Your