The Great Chicken Debate

.Group-think is a terrible, terrible thing. When I say group-think you might be picturing something different than me. You may picture scientists working on a cancer vaccine, engineers developing an efficient and smart transit system, or artists getting together for one of those artisty-tributy albums celebrating Haiti or trees or something of the sort. Generally, you might picture collaborating and cooperation towards a common goal.

When I imagine group-think I picture angry Lakers fans burning police cars in Los Angeles after winning a championship. I see people joining mobs protesting this or that, but are really just there to robbing grocery stores. I imagine it's like when somebody says, “Let's start the wave.” And then the next thing you know the whole stadium is doing the mexican wave while you're trying to watch the game. All were once good things (championships, civic activism, a baseball game) and got turned into horrible, horrible things (the mexican wave).

Its that mob mentality, it's the thing that reasons with you and says since everybody else is cheating, I can too because the odds are so small I won't get caught. I'm gonna riot because there are thousands of others and I wanna be part of something. You, the person joining it, are on the outside most the time. You are waiting for an event or activity to hit critical mass before you commit. You won't show up to a protest when there are two people. You will when there are two thousand. When somebody asks you to go to a party, you ask who else is gonna be there and have a mental checklist present. You check the facebook page to see if all your other friends have committed first. You go to a sports game and do wave because SIT DOWN SO I CAN WATCH THE DARN GAME!!!

Getting caught up in and joining a movement or sensation can be good if you are getting caught up with how cool rocky road ice cream is, for instance. It can also be bad. Like in this story I'm telling you.

Here at the orphanage, we are ridiculously blessed to have an incredible, godly benefactor that every month donates chickens to us. A lot of chickens. And we eat those chickens. And it is good.

Here at the orphanage, we also have mangoes. A lot of them. They literally grow on trees. Its turning into a good year for mangoes, and come December, I will be feasting on them. The kids have already started feasting on them.

The more perceptive members of our audience will notice that it is not yet December. It is in fact a long way from December. So you may be wondering why kids are eating mangoes. I am wondering that as well. You see mangoes are delicious, healthy, and one a day will keep the doctor away. Unfortunately, four or five will send you running for a doctor.

Mangoes, before they ripen, and small and hard and not really anything at all. It's kind of like a crab-apple. If you ate that crab-apple in June. It is small, crunchy, devoid of flavor, and the kids here have to eat it with salt just to stomach it. And that is part of the problem. The kids just can't stomach it. Eating mangoes before they are rip is almost sure to cause diarrhea and vomit and upset stomach. It's kind of like and anti-pepto bismol. Is “pepto” some sort of prefix for anti already? In that case the mangoes are just like bismol.

Every year we have to tell the kids to not eat the mangoes before they get ripe. Every year we have this big fight with them. It's really shameful and embarrassing for us taking care of them. They are well fed, three square meals a day, and often we have leftovers (although sometimes that is due to Mama Maria cooking curmudgeonly). They are not wanting in food. Every year there is the issue of kids eating the unripened mangoes before they fall and always after they are bedridden with diarrhea and stomach pains. One year it got so bad that we made them climb up and shake all the mangoes out of the trees so nobody would be tempted. It also meant no ripe mangoes. Diarrhea, shmiarrhea they said at first, but nobody was laughing later when they got it, AND had to forgo mangoes the whole year.

Well, this year it's started again. We noticed several days ago that there were a whole bunch of girls that stayed home from school. As one of the younger ones walked out of the house to grab some fresh air I checked up on her and she said was she had been throwing up and her stomach hurt. I asked when it started. She candidly replied it started on Monday and was probably from all the mangoes she ate over the weekend.

Later another girl came out with the same problems. She had diarrhea and stayed home from school. She said it started after she started eating mangoes the day before. It appears we were narrowing in on our culprit. We later swung through the girls to take a quick count of the sick and check in to make sure nobody was going to die on us. I don't like people dying on us. I don't think they do either.

After we chastised them for eating mangoes (and please be aware at this point that, other than Dorca, the sick ones were all older than 14) they girls huddled up inside their house and came out with their new line of attack. They decided than instead of confessing and saying they were indulging in the forbidden fruit, they would blame the chicken we ate the night before.

Yes, I know we have all been kids before. And I now realize how stupid I must have been as a kid for some of the things I tried to get away with. In order to save their pride and reputation the kids decided to blame the amazing, flavorful, fat chickens that are so graciously donated to us every month. These chickens that EVERYBODY ate without getting sick from other than these seven or eight girls (and two boys, I can't leave them out). The kids started coming up and saying that they think it was the chicken that got them sick.

At this point, it was really hard to not just laugh and laugh and laugh. We did take it seriously for a brief moment, but remembering that the first girls said that they were eating unripe mangoes, and the fact that forty other people ate the same chicken without getting sick just proved their ridiculousness. We then moved on to my favorite part of parenting: Calling The Bluff.

At night after Bible study is time for announcements. So, we asked the girls if they were still sick. The answer was a resounding yes. We pried further, asking if it was because of the chickens. There was another resounding yes. We then asked if we could take the chickens and throw them in the trash so that the kid's don't get sick anymore. There was one last resounding yes, followed by lots of “Wait, what?” and, “Can you repeat the question?” with a side of, “I'm waiting for the punchline. This is a joke, right?”

There was then about two minutes of silence from the girls, accompanied by six minutes of the boys rolling on the floor laughing realizing we were calling their bluff with our own bluff. When we finally got a little bit of silence, we were able to explain that since the chickens are making all the girls sick the only solution was to throw them in the trash so nobody else would get sick. This was followed by me having to rebuff offers by the boys to just eat a double portion of chicken every night in order to keep the girls from getting sick.

After another five minutes of boys rolling on the floor, cooler heads started to prevail. Several of the girls asked to speak, and in doing so petitioned the rest of their compatriots to just confess that they were eating mangoes and be done with the whole mess. It kind of turned into an ugly mess on the girls side, and they started arguing between themselves over who was lying; the chicken accusers saying the others were lying about the mangoes, and the mango accusers saying the others were lying about the chicken. And the boys laughing at the whole thing.

Then the argument seemed to turn when one of the girls, seemingly at her wits end, implored the others to stop eating mangoes. That's why, she said, they all have diarrhea. It's God telling them to stop eating mangoes. She made a very poignant point. Soon, most of the girls (save for a view die-hards, too ashamed to admit they had been eating mangoes like they were going out of style) came around to saying they too had been eating mangoes and asked us not to trash the chicken because there was nothing wrong with it.

It seems as if the voice of God finally got through to them. (When imagine the voice of God, does he sound like Charlton Heston? If so, you are sadly mistaken. That's actually Moses you're hearing.)

And thus ended the saga of chicken vs. mangoes. Several weeks have passed, and some have refused to learn and continue to suffer their self-inflicted diarrhea, but for the most part, things are back to normal.