St. Gabriel's Day Feast

What a day. Today is an Ethiopian religious holiday, St. Gabriel's day, which meant lots of people in traditional clothing milling about on the streets, that the Telecommunications company was closed (and Kristen therefore couldn't replace her stolen cell phone SIM card as planned, though we didn't know that until we had walked all the way out there, of course, argh), and that we had more than one reason to celebrate today.

 

A number of folks from nearby towns had come into Bahir Dar for the weekend to celebrate Christmas and New Year's (and, as it turns out, St. Gabriel's...), and celebrate we did. We prepared a *feast*, which included fried chicken, made from scratch. From scratch meaning from _live_ chickens. [Disclaimer: if you are squeamish or vegetarian, or both, this post may not be for you].

 

We went to the market (four of us: Levi, Beth, Christie, and I), and bought 2 chickens (30 birr, or about $3, each), and Levi carried them home, tied together with a bit of cloth, upside down, in one hand. We also bought a huge aluminum pot for scalding the feathers off of them, as per Peace Corps cookbook instructions, and an enormous bottle of oil, along with some other handy items. Took a motorcycle taxi home; the driver saw absolutely no problem with cramming the 4 of us into the 3-person taxi, or with the fact that we were carrying this squawking cargo.

 

Slaughtering chickens is an experience I am glad to have had, and hope not to have to take any part in again anytime soon. We were fairly inept about the whole process, but succeeded, at least marginally, in the long run. I'll try to upload some pictures, eventually (the event was well documented, and with good reason--certainly among the more dramatic activities of life in Ethiopia thus far...). Levi was responsible for the killing, which was culturally appropriate, as only men do the actual slaughtering here.

 

The precise moment of killing a chicken is entirely unpleasant, in a way I couldn't have predicted. Blood spurting everywhere, pained clucking until the last moment, wild death throes. Ours didn't really "run around" like chickens with their heads cut off, but there was still some violent wing flapping going on after their heads were already on the ground. Levi's pants and shirt were covered in blood--looked like he had just been in some sort of terrible knife fight. Christie kept saying "it's only nerves, he's already gone," as a mantra as they were flapping around, and we all had to repeat it to keep being able to face what was happening. I only had one major flip-out, when blood spattered onto my glasses, it was more than I could take and I had to run to wash my face. Beth (a nurse) was quite clinical about the whole matter, at least once they were actually dead, and in fact, I was proud of all four of us for our bravery about the whole thing.

 

Even once the chickens were plucked (no mean feat in itself...), we realized that we'd never actually prepared a whole chicken. None of us, in fact, had any idea how to skin or section a chicken. And the fact that we were working on the carcasses next to a plastic bucket filled with chicken heads, wings, feathers, and plenty of blood/water soup didn't make the task any easier. Nor did a kitten trying frantically to get at the meat.  All in all it took us almost 2 hours to slaughter, pluck, cut-up, and fry the meat. And these two full chickens made a whopping 10 pieces of fried chicken (granted, some of the pieces were big, because we couldn't figure out how to separate them to make them any smaller).

 

This whole time, I was picturing a pack of boneless skinless chicken breasts for sale at ANY grocery store in America, and was thinking (a) about how these chickens probably had a nicer life (and perhaps even a nicer death, unfortunately enough), than any of the ones in American groceries, (b) how BIG American chicken breasts are--hormones? (c) how either appreciative and/or disgusted I am going to be about being able to buy those chicken breasts when I get back to the states. I feel like I really understood, for the first time, what it really means to kill an animal in order to eat it. It's terrible. And at the same time manageable, just kind of feels like a part of life. I was both appalled and impressed at my own ability to take part in killing and eating a chicken. So it gave me yet another something to think about. Getting and preparing food, even cleaning up after eating, takes so much more effort here (and yet is so very much cheaper...we're given 600 birr per month--just over $60--for food, which is, frankly, exorbitant).

 

The rest of the dinner was much easier to prepare (and equally delicious), though it was decidedly an odd selection (including many goodies sent from families and friends, which were much appreciated. Even canned ham was happily consumed--this should tell you something about our state of mind). It was also wonderful to get to see everyone who came in for the weekend; though it has only been a couple of weeks since we left training, I was already missing these folks, who I'd grown so close to over the past couple of months.