
Chicken Volleyball. It sounded fun enough and we were running out of things to do.
I was twenty, and spending a few weeks of my summer volunteering with a Christian outreach organization that put on programs in small communities. We did skits and bad street dances and held sports nights in rec centers and church basements.
I was co-leading a group in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan with my friend Marty Nish. With us, were seven or eight fourteen to seventeen-year-olds who helped us run the program. Most of the kids who came to our program were rowdies from the local juvenile detention centre and seemed to need high energy things to do. They didn’t have the attention span to sit around watching cheesy skits. Marty and I were getting a little desperate.
I had a book called “Fun Things To Do: 101 Activities for Youth Group Events.” It listed things like scavenger hunts, progressive dinners, car wash fundraisers. We didn’t have time for those, but Chicken Volleyball looked do-able.
Here’s how it worked:
You were supposed to buy a raw chicken—no need for grade A…the cheapest chicken would do, since you weren’t going to be eating it, after all.
It was helpful, the book said, to keep the chicken a little bit frozen.
You were supposed to get a large bed sheet (fortunately there was a Value Village close-by) and cut the bed sheet into strips about two feet wide and three feet long.
You were supposed to set up the volleyball game as usual, except participants were asked to get a partner and a strip of bed sheet. Instead of a ball, each set of partners were supposed to hold the cloth strip between them and use it as a slingshot to catapult the chicken over the net.
And of course the rest of the game was supposed to carry on in this same way, with each team volleying back the raw chicken with their piece of bed sheet. Back and forth, back and forth.
Only it didn’t really work like that.
Maybe we didn’t have the most highly co-ordinated bunch of kids, but mostly, the chicken just landed with a splat on the gymnasium floor. The kids laughed, and lugged the chicken back onto their bed sheet, which had begun to get rather damp with melted chicken juice.
After a while, as the chicken got warmer and floppier, pieces started to fall off. We chucked the stray chicken parts in the garbage and kept playing with the carcass until the little bag of gizzards fell out and someone stepped on one of the kidneys and got it all over the bottom of their shoe, at which point Marty and I looked at each other and realized this had been a terrible idea.
I’m not sure why Salmonella had not, until then, occured to me. I’m pretty sure it was because the game idea had come from a book—a real, actual book—and surely the publishers would not have published something that had the potential to make someone (never mind an entire group of kids) sick.
But right at that moment, as that kid stood there wiping raw kidney off the bottom of his shoe, little bits of chicken flesh strewn across the floor, I realized this could have possible fatal consequences.
We made all the kids go to the bathroom and wash with soap and water and then sent them home to change their clothes with strict orders not to put their hands in their mouths.
Marty and I found the bottle of lemon disinfectant in the cleaning closet and our whole group set to washing every spot the chicken had touched. We threw away all the wet, pink-stained bed sheets and, of course, the mangled chicken.
And then Marty and I sat slumped against the gymnasium wall, trying to figure out what we’d do the next day.