OE – Tuesday
On Tuesday my traveling group stayed at base camp. In the morning we built sand castles.
Then we had ministry time at a local Filipino elementary school. We took lunch to the students and played games with them. My squad had 3rd grade; there were 78 kids in one room. It was really full! After everyone had food we gathered together for a Vacation Bible School type lesson. We sang songs with the kids – in Tagalog and English. There was a Bible lesson on Joseph, and our kids helped act out portions of the story. The last couple pictures are a few of my girls eating lunch on the way back to base camp.
The special event at base camp was the chicken kill. We had to kill our chickens for dinner. It was actually kinda cool. (Please note: These pictures might not be appropriate for small children or squeamish people.)
- First you swing the chicken around in a wind mill motion.
- This disorients the chicken.
- My girls named our chickens Freddy and Alice.
- We were then known as the squad who named their chickens. Thankfully this didn’t result in any psychological problems when it came time to eat them for dinner.
- There were 2 kill options. One was to place the chicken on the sand with a bar over its neck. You yank on the feet and its head comes off.
- Be sure to have the bucket ready so the chicken doesn’t drip blood everywhere.
- The second option was to put it in this funnel-shaped container and slit its throat. I personally considered this less humane since the kids struggled to actually cut the jugular.
- Then the adults held the chickens in boiling water to loosen the feathers.
- Next it was plucking time.
- Chickens have a lot more feathers than I realized. There’s lots of little tiny ones, and they’re important to get off since we didn’t want to eat them.
- Before the gutting someone came to cut the feet off.
- I was proud of my girls who were willing to pull the guts out.
- After we cleaned them out and got them approved our chickens went to the kitchen to be boiled.
Then we had free time for a couple hours before preparing the rest of our dinner. The kitchen crew boiled our chickens and then my squad chose to use the rotisserie to BBQ them. We also cut up potatoes and carrots and cooked them in foil in the fire. Our dessert was muffins poured into orange peels, wrapped in foil, and baked in the fire. They were amazing!!
- We started at the table with all of our supplies.
- A few girls took the vegetables and chickens to the fire.
- The boys were cooking one of their chickens this way too.
- They turned out great!
- Here are the orange peels ready for batter.
- Now they’re done (and super hot), so it was time to get them out of the coals.
- And finally there was a table decorating contest.
- We didn’t win the contest…
- …but our food tasted great!