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| Returning from the market with dinner. |
What I
am about to write is not for the faint of heart, for vegans or vegetarians. If
you are not a vegetarian before reading this you might turn into one after…. It
sure worked for me!! About a week ago a
few of us missionaries were talking about our favorite thing, FOOD. And somehow we started got on the topic of
chicken. I don’t know really how it was decided
or whose idea it was ( it could have been mine) but before I knew it we decided
to not only buy and cook a chicken, but to kill it and roast it over an open
fire. Janna who is a pediatric nurse at
the hospital here is a vegetarian but she wanted the whole chicken experience;
buying, killing, plucking, cleaning, and cooking a chicken. I think all her life she had repressed her
carnivore side, and it broke free in Africa.
I won’t lie, I was a full participant in the death of the chickens. I do not eat a lot of meat and my family
rarely if ever cooks meat and I was interested in the whole process in cooking
a chicken. The dentist here from Romania is not a vegetarian and had cooked and
killed many chickens and volunteered to help us. It was decided that Janna and I would go to
the market and find us a chicken for our chicken cook out. We had no luck finding a chicken at the
market but found a boy outside the hospital who had chickens for sale. When he brought us the chicken, I was not
impressed with it. It was quite small
with not much meat on its bones. Janna
who is a pro at haggling got the boy to not only lower his price but to add
another chicken to the deal. So now we
didn’t have just one chicken but two chickens!!
Now the trick was to get home with not only two chickens on my
motorcycle but a backpack full of food for the nutrition center women, a bag of
beans strapped to the back of the bike, and a side bag full of greens. So the boy tied the chickens feet together
and hung a chicken from each of my handle bars!! Janna and I couldn’t stop
laughing!! I looked like a traveling
gypsy with all my bags full of food and two chickens hanging from my handle
bars!! The whole way home I was
terrified of falling of the bike with all the food on my back, beans strapped
to the back of the bike, and a chicken on each of my handle bars. In some ways it seemed like the chickens were
enjoying their ride, with their wings flapping.
But I was a little nervous that one would try and peck me because their heads
hung right above my knees on the bike. Well to keep this bloody and sad story
short. … Saturday night we had a chicken party in the rain. We killed, plucked, cleaned and cooked the
chickens. We were planning on roasting
the chickens over our bon fire outside but when it rained we cooked the
chickens over a African wire cooker on our porch. I barely could swallow the
one bite of chicken that I took, because I could still picture the horrible
death of the chickens that I had participated in. I decided that yes If my survival or the
survival of ones I loved depending on the death of a chicken, then I could kill another chicken. But for any other reason for killing a
chicken I will not participate in. But
for now I am definitely a vegetarian in Africa.
The one good thing about the chicken we eate is that it was probably the
healthiest chicken I have ever eaten.
All the animals here in Chad are free range, and not plumped up with
chemicals or drugs or kept in tiny cages.
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