Ways to Avoid Strangling A Child

I woke up on Sunday expecting one of the worst days of service.  Not worst in a my plumbing broke and landlady and neighbors beneath are yelling at me sort of way.  Or worst in a cold and dark February morning, making my 45 minute walk to school through a city wide 3" semi-frozen puddle sort of way.  No, this was the sort of worst that involves 10 teenage boys, a cramped, uncomfortable minibus with an unnecessarily loud stereo, and 9 hours of driving in one day to play three hours of baseball.

Waking up at 5am, my adrenaline started to dip right around the time we walked out the door to catch our 6am hired bus.  Normally when people wake up super early to travel there is a hope of passing out once you've settled into your seat.  Normally people aren't sitting for 5 hours on a minibus, which have been meticulously designed to avoid any sort of lower back support.

But the rewards of escape were too much to avoid.  I willed myself to ignore the cross conversation, shouted in each ear by two coaches enough concerned about carsickness to ask me to take the middle, but not enough to nurse themselves in any sort of silent discomfort.  Between the a solid world of consciousness and a liquid world of dreamland bliss, my sleep was an unfilling jello.

Azeris like their music loud, because its not worth listening to unless it causes damage to your ears.  The shouted conversations weren't just over the roar of the road, but over the piercing Turkish techno, Azeri mugam, and traditional folk songs.  Soon, cheers erupted from the children.  We learned this was due to the driver having one of their favorite songs to shout at the top of their lungs.  And we learned that it was a favorite drinking song, celebrating being blackout drunk.  Towards the end of the trip we also learned the chorus as the song was cumulatively played 10% of our travel time.  For the last the couple hours I ignored all questions directed towards me, silently fantasizing about ways to bring about an end to this that would involve flames, and crying, and broken radios.

And we finally got to Kurdimir.  And despite my best effort my mood wasn't able to stay sour standing in the luxury of full posture in the sunshine.  Friends showed the appropriate amount of incredulousness that we actually drove all the way from Khachmaz.  And our kids magically transformed from maniacs to really fun kids, simply by removing the presence of a cramped van.

And they played well.  Our catcher finally had his first out at home plate, and our pitcher's glove hand had a painful badge of honor from two insane line drives he caught.  Consistently our infield would make double plays and our outfield finally started using their cutoff man, allowing us to make more outs and give less bases due to errors.  I never thought I'd see the day where when the Khachmaz Maximum (their chosen name) would field better than hit, but they did.  We won a couple games in the tournament and for the game we did lose, we never had to invoke the mercy rule to end an inning.  I was really proud of them.

And I was a little wiser for the road.  After the first two spins of Hallana Hallana, I laid down the rule: only once an hour.  When I busted out Sonic Racing on the iPad and iPod Touch it bought us an hour of almost pure silence.  By the time we entered into Xachmaz region, we well all in a pretty good mood and shouting along to Hallana Hallana at the top of our lungs.

For good volunteers, these are the days that make service worth it.  For normal volunteers, these are the days that remind us how necessary it is for there to be a law against strangling children.  For me it was both.