#52 - Murder

26/03/2011 (posted 04/04/2011)

Started the morning with some more fried banana. The great thing is that they taste just like potato wedges and nothing like horrible icky banana. I haven't had a banana for about sixteen years and I have managed to keep that up so far on this journey.

We did a kids programme in the morning. We were due to start at 8:30am but by 9am, no-one had turned up due to the quirky Panamanian timing. We eventually had about fifteen which was a decent enough amount for a Saturday morning.

We started with some of the silly sketches we have done in the past.
Jarett and Jonny were the cool 'n' creamy brothers and covered each other in shaving foam. Jess and I were Grecian Fountains and spat 3l of water all over each other. Luckily she could only reach my shoulder but I could bend down and spit right in her face each time. It was hilarious.
Bonnie and Christina did a new sketch, The Gross Twins, in which they did several disgusting things.
Firstly, Christina chewed some gum and then spat it into Bonnie's mouth for her to chew, and that was just for starters. The poor Welsh lass then sucked lemonade with a straw from Christina's mouth. For the next part, Christina brushed her teeth and spat it into a cup, Bonnie then brushed her teeth with this used water and spat it back out and Christina then necked the resulting water. It was horrible to watch but the audience were cracking up. Christina then chewed some banana which Bonnie extracted from her mouth with a spoon and ate. They finished with the traditional custard pie in each other's faces.

It was absolutely hilarious to watch as a spectator but really quite disgusting if you think about it. Fair play to them for doing it, I'm not sure I'd have been able to hack it.

After a lunch of rice and beans - never tire of it - we visited some houses around the village. In each one we shared the Evangecube and some people seemed really interested. One guy said his daughter is a Christian and he would like Jesus in his life so to witness that was truly great.
Dinner was spaghetti and fried spam which was actually delicious and most importantly, filling - each meal is pretty much a carb overload.

After dinner, I murdered a chicken.

They want to send us off tomorrow with a really good meal of chicken and there's no Sainsbury here so they chose the best chicken they had and asked which of us wanted to kill it.
All the other guys had killed one before so I volunteered. I knew I'd hate it but I feel it's an important experience for everyone to go through.

They tied its legs up and placed it on the floor in front of me. It took me ages to bring myself to roll it over as, being left handed, I needed its feet on the left so I could hold it in place with my left foot.
I then had to put my right hand over its eyes but it kept moving and it took me ages to finally get it in position. I started cutting but they hadn't removed any feathers and the knife was awfully blunt so after a fair bit of hacking through feathers, I had made very little progress.

It kept writhing around and it became agitated which made it even harder to get in position. But eventually I had it and after slicing and slicing, I finally cut its head clean off.

The locals were in stitches at my awful attempts and apparently it isn't the custom here to cut the head clean off so they loved it - they should have told me that before I administered the fatal cut but that's by the by.

I was ever so slightly emotionally scarred but I feel it's one more experience I can say I've done and who knows when I'll have to kill one again.
When I got back from murdering an animal, I went for a nighttime shower. The stars were glittering in the sky and the shower is outside so it was just a magical experience.

This was an absolutely crazy day in one way or another but it ended on such a massive high.
I will never forget how beautiful the sky is here.

JG