The Day We Bought a Goat

It's my last weekend in Migori. Hard to believe that in a week and a half I'll be comfortably back in the US with only pictures and blog posts to remember this place. It's really flown by and I hope to make the most of my last week here.

And we definitely decided to make the last weekend one to remember. Yesterday we bought a goat.And then we ate it. I don't know how to make this day sound any more interesting than it really was so I'll start from the beginning.

Saturday morning everyone awoke to the crying of Wilfred in the backyard (yes I named the goat, and yes I know that was a terrible, terrible thing to do with something I was planning to eat). The night before we had made an arrangement to buy this goat from our cook and make a day of it. When else were we going to witness the "processing" of food from beginning to end?

So we made a day of it. We sent the boys off with the task of buying beer and us girls headed to the market to find the fixings for our dinner. It was really actually fun to shop in Migori. You can't just go to the supermarket to pick up all the produce you need, we had to go stand to stand in the market and barter prices- we always end up paying more than others because we're white- until we had everything we needed.

Then we came home and the goat was slaughtered. I don't know what I expected, but watching its throat get slit was absolutely horrific. They don't die instantly. I shed a couple tears. It's obviously not the blood and gore of it that gets me-I've seen that every day in surgery- it's the complete loss of life that I'm not used to. The only death I've ever witnessed was when we put our poodle, Sasha, down. That was an animal in pain looking as if she were just closing her eyes to sleep. This was much different, but I got over it. After the goat was hung by his hind legs from the tree outside I even helped skin it a bit- the freshly killed, warm body much different from the cold cadavers of pigs and cats that I was used to working with in bio labs. We roasted it, and ate it, and it was delicious. Oh, and I forgot we bought a chicken also (for 300 shillings- less than $4) and so we plucked the feathers and fried that as well. Great meal.

Afterwards, we spent the night playing "Celebrity" a combination of Catch Phrase, Password, and charades. It was a great night, and today we've lazily laid in the sun and read books.

I wanted to post this because I feel as though all my posts are very romanticized. I want you to know that we have some days where nothing is heart wrenching, emotionally straining, and dramatic. There are some days where we eat goat and lay in the sun and read books. We're not a bunch of martyrs over here doing incredible healing or anything like that. We're learning about each other, and we're learning about ourselves, and we're learning about medicine and making the most of the time we have left.