Animal Adventures

So, I got a special request for a blog post, by my mother! I told her a few stories related to animals, meat, and butchering, and she thought it merited a blog post, so here it is!

As most families live on farms and raise their own animals here in the village, I’ve gotten much closer to the slaughtering and butchering process than ever before. And strangely, I’m getting very used to it! I’ll also discuss other (live) animal interactions I’ve experienced. Meat is a huge part of Namibian culture and is typically eaten with both lunch and dinner here.

Examples of things that don’t faze me too much anymore:

•        Being woken up by a rooster.
•        Running to close the door before the hungry herd of goats that just entered your yard decide to enter your house.
•        Seeing that a rooster is charging at you, while you’re mid-squat/peeing at nighttime on the homestead (at night, we forego the long walk to the pit latrine and just drop trow) and having to quickly pull up your pants and make a run for it.
•        Plucking a chicken while it’s blood is dripping on your foot.
•        Watching a cow be hacked into pieces, with a predictably dull knife. And standing a bit too close and being spattered with cow bits.
•        Watching a school janitor use a pocketknife to saw away at a cow’s head to get any cheek meat, the eyes, and anything else edible off.
•        Going to put your lunch in the fridge at school and finding an entire cow’s head there. You close the fridge and reopen it to do a double take… yep, it’s still there. You shrug and balance your lunchbox carefully on top of the cow’s (open) eyeball.
•        Opening up any freezer to just find chunks of meat in there, typically not wrapped in any way at all. If they are “wrapped,” it’s just inside of an open plastic grocery bag. You shrug and put your water bottle on top, because cold water is worth its weight in gold here!
•        Eating fat, tendon, and other parts of the meat that Americans typically deem inedible. I’m doing my best to learn to clean the bones!

And some more venomous adventures...

•      When you find a scorpion in your flat, have a minor freak-out, then quickly gather yourself to find a shoe and kill it. You smack it ~10 times to make sure it's dead. You flush the scorpion down the toilet and do your best to shrug it off.
•     A week later, you find another scorpion (this variety is more venomous than the first). You are legitimately calm, kill it, flush it, and then go about your morning routine.
•     When the grade 7s are in your yard using your sink for drinking water, they find a poisonous snake on the ground and see it go up into the tree. You hear them making noise outside, so you go out to investigate. They tell you what's happening. You shut the windows, lock the doors, and decide it's best if you head back to school and leave the attempts at snake killing to the 12 year olds.

All those, and I’m sure many, many more that I’ve forgotten and that are yet to come. It’s about to be wedding season here in December, and many people slaughter around 50 cows for a wedding. So, I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say on the topic a few weeks from now!

Happy animal (& meat) adventures to you all!