Fear Factor

James spends almost every Thursday evening with the 16-18 year old boys from church doing some sort of activities. Sometimes they're educational or purposeful and sometimes there is no intended purpose other than fun.

Well, a few weeks ago, they had a Fear Factor night with a few activities. Brother Pyne set up an activity where they had to try 10 different unidentified foods that were a bit off the usual menu like sardines, jicama, peppers, chile powdered dried papaya, some turkey flavored tofu and others. So, all of it was normal food that somebody would eat but not necessarily what these kids eat. He added a level of difficulty saying that they had to try the foods and express gratitude and grace no matter what the taste just as they would as missionaries visiting in people's homes for dinner.

Most of the boys did very well either trying the food and saying "Thank you" or learning how to politely refuse the food. The last item of the ten was a piece of habanero pepper and the first boy ate it, and sat down and about 30 seconds later abruptly left. He found a loaf of bread in the church fridge and brought a slice back and was in visible pain. However, since he ate it, most of the other boys felt the need to man-up and eat it as well even after seeing how much pain he was in. Does this make sense? To be honest, I have never seen a person turn so red or so purple as some of those boys did after eating that pepper. Also, whoever owned that loaf of bread had nothing left to come back to... oops. I have to say, I have no desire whatsoever to add "Eating a Habanero Pepper" to my list of accomplishments in this life.



James had two activities that we prepared. One was a spaghetti dig. I made about 5 lbs of spaghetti and we split it up between the eight boys. I had poured lots of extra oil on it to make it slippery and gross. Then, we buried 6 plastic bugs in each plate and timed the boys to see how many they could retrieve out of the spaghetti using only their mouths. I have to say, they were pretty good at this. The other activity is one I've seen done at baby showers. Basically, you get a baby bottle of water for each person and have them race to see who can drink it first. So we filled a bunch of bottles with root beer and had the boys test their bottle drinking ability. I really thought they would be squirmish at the thought of drinking from a bottle but not so... No, actually, this was the quietest this group of boys has ever been for a somewhat extended period. It was frankly amazing!