In Which the Boys Go Barnstorming

School has made it to the end of the second term here and so we’re on a bit of a break. While I assume most kids back in the states are eating sno-cones and riding their bikes to the park everyday for their summer break, the boys at the orphanage have taken a much more capitalist approach to their two-week term break.How so? Lemonade stand? Lawn mowing? Goat herding? No, no, and mostly no. We’ve been playing soccer!

How does playing soccer earn you money? It’s very simple. So simple in fact that if word gets out it could revolutionize professional sports. I’ll explain.

Say you have a baseball team, or basketball, or football team. Let’s exclude the fringe sports like roller derby or boxing for a second. It’ll soon become clear. What if instead of paying your players whether they win or lose with guaranteed contracts, you only pay them if they win and do a good job. This makes sense in real businesses, so why not sports. If I have an airplane company and the people building the airplanes haven’t quite figured out the whole “flying” thing they are soon going to be out of a job when nobody buys my defective product. Or let’s say you have a restaurant where the food is really good and the line is out the door. The chefs are gonna keep their jobs and you’ll need to hire more waiters.

Here in Nampula we have that system. It seems almost every day without fail there has been a group of boys (one day it was full grown men) coming to the orphanage asking to play soccer. Our boys usually take a good look over them just to make sure there are no ringers or anything on the squad, and then we begin negotiating the cost of the game. After several minutes of heated negations, we usually agree on a contribution by each team of about 50meticais (or $2) for a winner-take-all soccer game. The money then goes in to an escrow account (read: my pocket) and the game begins.

We keep the games refereed pretty tightly so there’s no bad play by the losing side (super common) and so far this break our boys have yet to lose a game.They are thrilled with their winnings. The money is going into the ball fund so we can keep having balls to play with. You might be wondering why we would get so worked up over winning $2 dollars every day. Well, if you’re the other team that has come all the way out here to challenge us, you just lost your bus fare home after the game. Now you might be wondering if we feel bad for winning money hand over fist. No, we don’t.

So just think about that next time you’re watching Chone Figgins that one guy on your team that is making millions of dollars for doing absolutely nothing.