Goats, Snow, and Breadbowls

From Friday June 4

Easily one of my favorite days in this country so far. We are one week into exams and I caught up on all my grading on Thursday, plus had no exam to give this morning, so I could go in late.

One of the other teachers, Ntate Kao, and I have been trying to buy a goat since Memorial Day weekend. Unfortunately selling a goat for the equivalent of about $25 requires more paper work than buying a used car in the States. The goat registration wasn’t in order (seriously), so we had to go through a different seller. We ended up buying one from my host family, actually. We got all the paperwork signed at the chiefs and led our lunch/dinner up to Kao’s house to slaughter and butcher it. This whole process took four of us about 2 hours.

The last 2 weeks have been really cold at night and in the morning, but once the sun comes out it warms up enough so that you don’t have to wear winter hats and gloves around. Today was different. The clouds rolled in, blocking the sun, and it was COLD. This was even worse since we were working with sleeves up and wet hands (with water from the freezing cold tap) while cleaning the goat. We were just about finished and were cleaning out the organs for cooking when it started to snow. First time I had seen it snow for real here (actually accumulating some, and not melting as it came down). In the end we didn’t get much more than a dusting, but still snow in Africa was pretty cool.

Because it was so cold, we moved inside to do the cooking. One of the guys who helped us butcher the animal lived right next door and had an empty room used as a kitchen. We lit a fire with some branches and threw the pot on. Now there are no chimneys in my village – or most of the country for that matter – so when people cook like this (usually first thing every morning and again in the evening), they just leave the door open to let the smoke out. This has mixed results at best and you crouch as low to the floor as you can, but your eyes still tear up from all the smoke. Even still, you want to stay close to the fire, both to stay warm and so you don’t miss out on the food. It actually reminded me a lot of the huts in the Breckenridge backcountry. Lots of people sitting on whatever warm/dry surface they can find, huddled trying to stay warm while it snowed outside and the inside was filled with smoke. Just with a far greater decapitated goat to white people ratio than I was used to in Colorado.

For lunch that day we had some of the preferred Basotho meat from the goat. Basically it was all of the organs except the testicles, kidneys (still tucked inside the corpse), one of the stomachs (which didn’t fit and was saved for later), the gall bladder, and the plain, olde fashioned pee bladder. That left all the intestines, 3 more stomachs, the heart, the lungs, the liver, and probably some other stuff that I missed going in. Everything was chopped up and stewed over the fire with some water and salt. I was a little skeptical of some of the stuff at first – I thought the heart would be tough, the lungs slimy, and the stomachs, when turned inside out, looked like sponges – but it was all great, with a special shout out to the anus. You were delicious, goat anus.

The best part about the cold is my house is essentially a meat locker (things keep freezing inside – I have to break through a layer of ice in my bucket every morning to make coffee or oatmeal, and my towel froze solid when I took a bath at night and hung it up to dry) so that means the goat carcass keeps almost indefinitely. That first night I took home one of the forelimbs to cook for dinner. Couldn’t really decide what to do with it, so I went with a goat curry. Didn’t have any vegetables except for potato and onion, but it turned out very good, especially on a cold night. The best part: when I opened up my bread bin, there was a small loaf I had made, just the perfect shape and size for a bread bowl.

So there you have it, fresh goat curry, in a breadbowl, while it was snowing, in Africa. Good day.