Warning: This is a fantastic idea. It is not safe, it is not sane and it is a huge waste of matches, but it is a fantastic idea.

I learned a new trick. If you hold a match head down against the strike pad on the box and flick it like a paper football, it lights on fire and goes flying through the air. That alone is cool. Little flying fireballs are always cool. However, we took it to the next level of awesome, and to the next level of stupid.

One of the other Peace Corps volunteers found cheap matches. He got 100 boxes for 580 vt or the equivalent of about $6 USD. We had a lot of matches. We have a lot of time. This and a shoebox make fire football!

We put a shoe box full of paper scraps on the ground. You get a point if you light the paper on fire. That was the extent of the game and it entertained us for about two hours, or 18 boxes of matches. After the 18^th box we started to feel guilty about wasting matches and stopped playing. A good thing since my fingers were getting sore from flicking matches. I lit the paper on fire 8 times. We only burned out one box in the process….

The aftermath

Before anyone says I am being too irresponsible and could start a jungle fire, I will point out that I live in the tropics. It rains every day. The place is wet, all the time. In fact, it was raining while we were playing. Fires don’t get out of control here, they just sort of smolder and die.

This was the best entertainment I’ve discovered in the last month or two. My life is different now.