The Killing of a Village Chicken

It may say something of my fascination with food that I have given this one activity its own blog. Perhaps it is to alleviate the constant rambling of my life narrative. Or perhaps I feel like I need to respect the life of the chicken that continued to chase me, headless, across my yard. I don’t fully understand why the village chicken deserves its own blog post, but it just feels right.  

In addition, this is should be a somewhat amusing post as I am simply going to get you up to where YouTube can take over. My wonderful roommate Hannah dug through the 30 minutes of raw footage to combine some highlights into a ten minute video.  For some, ten minutes of killing and gutting a chicken may be fascinating. For many of my Vermont peeps (no pun intended), this may be like watching someone make chocolate chip cookies...rather uninspiring. However I encourage you to watch it for the sheer number of ridiculous moments and memorable quotes. They are not highlighted, so you kind of have to listen.

The idea to kill a village chicken had brewing in the back of our heads for a while. They can be seen on the side of the road under domes made of bent branches and held together with twine, or can be found riding around in wooden wheelbarrows in square cages made of the same. However, the idea could easily have fluttered away, forgotten between lion hunts and the temptation of beach paradise. Turns out that sometimes it is just these fleeting ideas that are the most memorable.

  However, the second Sunday of Big Man’s visit had turned out to be rather dull.  We had hoped to change our Monday tickets to Zanzibar to Sunday to gain one extra day of beach paradise. Unfortunately, after a visit to two different offices, we discovered that Zambezi airlines are still learning how to do good business, and we were stuck.  After feeling a little bored and disappointed with a day filled with purely shopping, we hopped into a cab to take us back home.  It was Sunday at about 5 pm. In a country where Christianity is written into the constitution, it seemed that our chances at purchasing a chicken were low, and we had pretty much abandoned the idea. Our night was looking like a movie and bed.

Not to be.  After chatting with the taxi driver, a cultural requirement in Zambia, I happened to ask him if he knew where we could get a village chicken. There was nowhere, he said, that we could get a village chicken in downtown Lusaka at this time. We would have to go the Garden compound. And, of course, he was just the man to take us.  

The non-definition of a compound

In Zambia, ‘compounds’ refer to high density residential areas.  What many may consider as a ‘slum’ would fit under the definition of a compound, but also a neighborhood of dense, middle-class houses may be referred to as a compound. All of my research with orphans and the impoverished take place in ‘compounds,’ but I also have many close friends that live in compounds who are not ‘in poverty.’ I am using these words loosely in order to try and convey the broad definition and connotation of a ‘compound.’  There is no universal definition of a typical ‘compound,’ but when you work with the impoverished, you will probably end up in one.

Some of the more impoverished compounds consist of houses with cement walls and steel sheets as roofs. Many don’t have doors. Residences are not necessarily on a road, and sometimes they are linked together by paths. Roads, when they do exist, were often once paved (under the former president Kaunda) and have fallen into disrepair. I have learned a bit about bad roads since I have been here, mostly from the terrible road that I live on. It is much better not a pave a road in the first place than to pave it and then neglect it for years. Most of the roads here look, at first glance, as if they are only made of sand or gravel. However in reality there are chunks of pavement under the sand, so the rises between the cavernous potholes have the hard jagged edges of concrete. Also, in a normal sand/gravel road, the depth of potholes are somewhat mitigated by the general runoff of the entire surface layer of the road, thus lowering the level of the road in general. Here, sections of old pavement are held solidly at one level, with the water having to go in between. The concrete doesn’t ‘runoff,’ so to say. Therefore you have many deep, deep potholes with jagged pieces of hard concrete in between. You cannot go more than five to ten miles per hour in a 4WD.  Low hanging cars, needless to say, do not last long. 

These kinds of compounds are places that you wouldn’t see while just visiting Lusaka. You would have to be invited into someone’s home or work in them to see to them. Or, you would have to be with a great cab driver taking you to buy a village chicken. It would be uncomfortable, if not risky, to just walk in by yourself.  When people think about poverty in Africa, they often picture circumstances similar to these compounds. Needless to say, we had been trying to figure out how to get Mark in to see these places as they are similar to the places that I work when I am in the field. They are not places you would just enter. My roommate Casey described it well to Mark. You wouldn’t just walk into a compound to look around, just as you wouldn’t go walk into the Bronx in New York City just to look at it.

So, when our cab driver Sam offered, we jumped. We sped home to drop off our purchased items. My roommate Hannah, who is my cooking guru and future chef of the Zanzibari restaurant I will someday invest in, was innocently standing in the kitchen as I dashed in and dropped my things. I yelled from my room to get ready. We were going to the compound to buy a village chicken. As expected, she was perhaps the only person of my six person house who was as excited as I was.  And then we hopped into the cab were off to Garden compound.

The buying and killing of a village chicken

                Despite my long definition of a compound, our trip was uneventful, except that Mark got to see a compound. I had never been to the Garden Compound, so it was my first time as well. The Garden compound is about a seven minute drive from my house. My house, for those of you who don’t know, is a mini palace. My program initially placed me in a modest house, but my landlord/roommate Virginia moved us here about two weeks after I arrived. The main house that I live in is enormous. There are six bedrooms, an enormous kitchen, and three bathrooms. It has a dining room, living room, garage, and a veranda that has a tiled floor and is enclosed with white metal grating with intricate designs. The veranda leads out to the back yard, which contains an in-ground pool and a huge avocado tree. Behind that, there are three other buildings which are rented out as residences and to a business.  The entire thing is enclosed by a wall, which is the way houses are in Lusaka. We have a flat screen TV, DVD player, etc. I am not living in a thatch hut in rural Africa.  Although it is one of the nicer houses on the street, it is surrounded by other residences that are similar.

                Seven minutes from this, it is a different world. The contrast was startling. We were still talking to the Sam the driver about how much a chicken would cost as we turned off the main, paved road and headed Garden compound. I had passed this side road hundreds of times without as much as a thought. Suddenly, the walls that shield residences from view were gone, as were household doors. While the main roads of Lusaka are dominated by cars, the road into the compound was dominated by people. You could see hanging laundry everywhere. It was different than the more rural compounds that I work in in the field. It was busier, and slightly more built up. Not five minutes in, we turned into what I can only describe as Zambian compound strip mall.  Sure enough there was a woman in the parking lot selling chickens out of the typical wooden cage. Though it was five o’clock on a Sunday, there was music blaring, full blast, out of a little bar. People had clearly been drinking all day. The driver explained that those who are unemployed often drink all day, every day, if they can afford it, and the bars are open early in the morning. Despite the typical strict observance of the holy day which closes almost everything else, the regulation of alcohol on Sundays is clearly an American gaffe. Our driver hopped out of the car, explaining that as mzungus we would be charged triple the price, and went to go discuss the chicken with the woman.  With lots of looks and gesturing towards our car, and after attempting to give my best ‘I may be a mzungu but I know how things work here Auntie’ look,  a fine looking live chicken was finally sold to us for the price of 20 pin, or approximately 4 dollars.

The Village Chicken

The Village Chicken....Alive

                As you may have noticed, we specifically bought, killed, and ate a village chicken. In Zambia, there are two kinds of chicken. ‘Chicken’ refers to the chicken you buy at the grocery store, prepacked. You can’t get village chicken in the grocery store. ‘Village chicken’ refers to the chickens are that bred and raised by Zambians in the villages or compounds. Village chicken is preferred by many, and it is quite different for many reasons.

                Many people probably already know about this little explanation I am going to give, especially the VT readers, but for those that don’t, here it is.  American’s have created a new chicken. The chicken that we eat, the Broiler chicken, is a far cry from the chicken as God/evolution made. We like white meat, and in particular the tender white meat from the breast. So, using intense artificial selection, we bred chickens into a different body type. The breasts of Broiler chickens are largely exaggerated, and the legs are vastly shorter. The actual proportions of the body are different. And, obviously, intense hormone injections make their bodies plumper. The muscle is more tender, body fat concentration higher. There are actual some physical problems that chickens have because of these unnatural proportions. This is essentially all that you can get in American supermarkets.

                However, Monsanto and Price Chopper haven’t reached the chickens raised in the villages of Zambia. These are chickens that have not been bred for white meat. They have not been hormone injected to be fat and juicy. They are, indeed, a 100% natural chicken. They are tougher, darker, and smaller, and as you will see, they look slightly different.

                And with that, I simply hand you over to YouTube. Again, lots of good quotes moments. My favorites? “It’s like….chicken skin…” There were also some that out were cut, most likely out of the impropriety of the low cut of my pajamas. So you miss, for example, such nuggets as when I disagree with Mark over whether the chicken was actually dead as he is holding its head in its hands, or when I pet the chicken and tell it that it’s alright as its headless and convulsing on the yard. Those aside, there’s plenty more nuggets…chicken nuggets….sorry, couldn’t resist. Enjoy!

Killing the Village Chicken - YouTube

 REMEMBER: IF YOU CAN'T KILL IT, DON'T GRILL IT!

He's psyched

Post murder

That cat joined too...Beth, we put that knife to good use. 

 

 

 

 

Cooks at work.....

Village chicken and...cupcakes? Oh, and this was after we decided it was a good idea to try and start a fire in the driveway to burn the remains, failed, left remnants of fire/chicken remains, and then tried to 'smoke' the chicken...also failed.....

               

Big Man arrives, and you can't escape Disney -The Videos

YouTube is an amazing thing.....
 

Chobe National Park on YouTube

Mark's Plunge on YouTube

Links are also posted to my Facebook wall.

Big Man arrives, and you can't escape Disney

There is a good reason for the gap in my posts. My past two months have been spent in room 14 of the ZCARHD office preparing for the second round of data collection and cleaning up the last bits and pieces of data from Round 1.  Not much to write home about, literally. My office is like any other office, except with unreliable internet. No gripping insights there. Everyone in world wants to go Office Space on the printer, and everyone in the world has office politics. We may all worship different Gods, but at least we can all agree as one human race on the main components of the office.

However, my time in Lusaka has enveloped me in the expat scene here, which has, in turn, been wildly fun, fulfilling, confusing, and frustrating.  There is something addicting about hanging out with a motley crew of Danes, Dutch, Nigerians, Canadians, African Bushmen, and Zambians.  It will require its own post, so I will leave it for later.

           Needless to say, after two months of office days and Lusaka nights, I was very excited for my leave and very excited to see Mark. He arrived on Saturday April 2nd after a smooth flight, (sans luggage), and we spent a couple of days tootling around Lusaka. He was called Big Man by about every Zambian he saw, and our tour around Kamwala market ended with Big Man and I trying Shake Shake (previously described vile concoction of fermented mealie meal) with a group of  charming and perhaps drunken Zambian men. It is amazing how fast a crowd gathers to watch mzungus try Shake Shake. If he was missing home at all, this was abated when we continued on to a bar  with a live band covering Michael Jackson songs. Good old MJ, yet another globally unifying factor.

                Then we hit the road to embark for a bush adventure. Thus begins part 1.    

               

Simba, Rafiki, Zazu, and more…

               

Monday morning saw us heading down to Livingston, in Zambia, to depart on our journey into the bush and to see the falls.  We saved the falls for after the safari, but we did embark to the Royal Livingston Hotel for a drink at sundown. If anyone ever wants to understand British Colonialism, visit the Royal Livingston. You drive through the typically African town of Livingston to get to a gated, royal palace.  We entered the gate, and behold, there were zebras just hanging out on the lawn. We immediately started talking in hushed whispers, thinking we were blessed with a chance encounter with this beautiful wild creature. We whipped out our cameras and asked our taxi slow down. He indulged us for about five minutes before calmly explaining that they were pet zebras kept by the hotel. Right. Stupid mzungus.

Spray from Victoria Falls from the deck of the Royal Livingston

 We then descended through a yard of scampering baboons to enjoy drinks on a deck that is literally in the Zambezi River.  It is positioned right before the edge of the falls. You could see the spray coming up over the edge. It was absolutely beautiful, and decadent, and Caucasian. We enjoyed a completely overpriced drink, which was actually listed in US dollars instead of Kwacha, before deciding that we had had enough. We booked it back to Livingston and walked through the bustling streets and markets at night. It was an invigorating experience I have been previously unable to enjoy due to the lack of a tall, fit, and let’s all admit it, rather handsomely fearsome looking male bodyguard.  We ate dried caterpillars, drank liquor out of a fun pop bag, and called it a night.

               

The next day we departed for Botswana, and entered the realm of the Lion King. When I say that, I mean it literally. Throughout the safari, when discussing animals that were graced with a lead role in the movie, our Botswana guide referred to them by that name. “There’s a zazu. There’s a rafiki.” (This drove our companion from Kenya insane, as he kept insisting that in Swahili Rafiki means friend, not monkey.) When describing the mass charges by buffalo, he would say “Like in that scene, in The Lion King.” Excuse the slight distortion of images. Resizing saves me hours, but not the best quality.

My favorite view of Chobe

We stayed on safari for two days and two nights. The park was Chobe National Park, which is known for its massive herds of elephants.  It is a large park, and we only saw the very tip. The park itself consisted of the Chobe River, which was overflowed during rainy season, and the dry lands. There were thus two different landscapes to observe wildlife. The river was amazing. There were just strips of green grassland among sparkling blue waters, and elephants and hippos were just roaming next to each other. The grasslands, however, had the most wildlife. We explored that particular part as the animals were forced to the river for water.

Our camp was six simple tents surrounding a fire. They were arranged in a semi-circle, with lanterns behind them. This was to orient them as a herd, to warn animals. The food was cooked by the safari team and was delicious. We were not permitted to walk too far outside the camp at night, and if we needed to use the drop toilet in the night, we were to call one of the guides for an escort. The camp was also equipped with a shower consisting water warmed in the sun and hung from a container with holes in it from a tree. Perhaps the most refreshing shower I have ever taken (can't post the pictures from that). We often had baboons, elephants, and impala simply stroll by in the mornings. 

The bush camp. Our is the one closest to the camera.

 Chobe has about 55,000 elephants within its border.  I have never experienced elephants in such a way before. They were just everywhere. We saw them swimming, eating, washing, dusting themselves (which they do after swimming to dry off), playing with babies, and we even saw an elephant baby that was only two or three days old. We had one get angry at us, and truly understood how scary and dangerous they actually are. They also have incredibly human characteristics (or, should I say, we have incredibly elephant-like characteristics.)  I don’t think I will ever be able to see an elephant in captivity again without my heart shedding a tear. They just belong in a place like Chobe. 

Mama Ele, Pap Ele, and Baby Ele

Dusting after a swim

Two day old elephant nursing

Peekaboo

  We were also lucky enough to see leopard, which is an extremely rare sighting. I actually couldn’t really see it with my bare eye. I needed the camera lens, and mentally thanked the salesmen in BestBuy who sold me on that digital zoom. It had apparently climbed the tree because it was scared of the nearby lions. Who could blame it? I also gained a new respect for giraffes. They are so incredibly graceful, and when they run it looks as if they are running in slow motion. That said, they can actually outrun many of the predators of the bush. They quickly rivaled the elephant as my favorite animal.

Lucky us!

Just another elephant

After day one, the group fell prey to the well-known symptoms of ‘been there, done that.’ We had so many elephant encounters that we soon got impatient when we had to wait for the elephants to cross the road in front of us. We saw so many impala and buffalo that we stopped even noticing them.  By the end of day two, you could tell how fresh another ‘rival’ safari truck was by observing which animals they were looking at. If they were observing impala, crocodiles, buffalo, elephants, or baboons, they were total amateurs. Freshmeat.  We, the more experienced and wiser safari team, were on to more important things: tracking lions.

The Lion King (or Queen)

Chobe is different than other national parks in Africa for a couple of different reasons.  First, there are no walking safaris allowed. In many parks you can trek with an armed guide through the bush to observe the animals. Secondly, there are no night drives allowed, which is when the lions are most active. And last but certainly not least, you cannot off road in Chobe.  This is the most significant difference. In most parks, you can slam your 4WD off the beaten path and go rumbling through the bush in search of wildlife. In Chobe, you must stay on a network of sand roads and view the visible areas. 

 At first, these all seem like negative differences.  I can just hear the thousands of diehard travelers whining ‘but then you can’t truly experience the African bush.’  I, as well, was worried that we wouldn’t have as good of an experience for lack of these opportunities. However, once there, I realized that these rules are part of what make Chobe so special.  Tourism is an important financial support for national parks, and as such, they strive to make visitors happy. Sometimes, you wonder who the park is actually for, the animals, or those that come seeking to see these exotic creatures in their natural habitat.  In Chobe, however, the park is for the animals.  You don’t get to off road into their habitat. You don’t get to track them by foot and put your scent everywhere, and you don’t get to disturb them at night when some of the most fearsome predators are hunting. In appearance, it looks as if the mark of humans is all over the park. The vast network of trails and the frequent encounters with other safaris reminds you constantly that you are neither the first nor the only visitor. However, you are stuck in a car on the road, and there are miles and miles of wilderness that you cannot touch. Thus, the wilderness of Chobe is preserved for the animals, and it is clear that the purpose of the park is for the wildlife. Perhaps we missed the experience of off-roading to find lions sleeping, but if everyone did that, would it really wilderness?  Would it really be a ‘sanctuary’ if there is no reprieve from the rumbling of safari trucks?

Lion cub tracks in the road

I bring this up because it is entirely relevant to the tracking of lions. Lions are brilliant at hiding themselves. They almost perfectly match the grass on the savannah.  Most of the places they can go in Chobe, you can’t see them. So lions are not a guaranteed sighting, and the tracking of lions is made much more difficult when you can’t rumble into the bush after them. Instead, you watch the sand road for tracks that may have crossed, and try to head to the other side of the flatland to see if they cross before you. Or, you listen to the baboons screaming and know that means that they have seen a lion, and you rush as fast as possible. Or, when an impala runs in front of you at full speed, you look to see what it is running from.

               

Camouflage

 Tracking lions is invigorating. Lions stick to the road, so you can follow their tracks. You judge how fresh the tracks are, how big the lion is. And when you find a lion or two, as we did, it’s absolutely petrifying. We rolled around the corner to find a female standing on an outcrop above us. Being in an open truck doesn’t make you feel to secure when you are 15 feet away from a lion staring down at you. To add to this affect, they often keep their mouths open to cool themselves off, thus exposing their enormous teeth. However, by far the most chilling lion encounter was watching lions on the hunt.

 We ran into two more females later that day, and they were hunting together. The walked, side by side, in perfect sync, through the long bushes. Then they saw us.  They stopped, both of them at exactly the same time, to turn and look at us. So, here we are, staring straight into the eyes of two female lions on the hunt. There was a couple seconds of silence, and then, in perfect sync, without looking at each other at all, they turned their heads forward and kept walking. They even started with the same paw. It is impossible to recreate the absolute synchrony and focus of that one moment. I felt deep pity for every one of the thousands of impala we had just passed. On the way home, the buffalo herd nearby had just started running. We heard them roaring to announce their kill to the male from our camp about two hours later. 

The hunters

Dignity embodied

                 

The Plunge and the Plume

After saying our goodbyes to the African bush and our leaving our poor guide in the hands of some dubious Americans (we all know the type), we departed back to our hostel and made our way to the famous Victoria Falls, the Smoke that Thunders, the Mosi-au-Tunya, the jewel of Zambia, the UN world heritage site, and most importantly, the namesake for my favorite Zambian beer, the infamous Mosi. 

I am made quite sure that the falls themselves are a spectacular sight. Unfortunately, we did not get to actually see the falls due to the booming sheet of spray that literally made them invisible, save for lucky breaks in the mist.  It was absolutely awe-inspiring, invigorating, and wet.  You could feel the absolute power that produced that spray, and stand at the edge of it.

Feeling the power

 The real invigoration of the day, however, came from other sources. The Victoria Falls Bridge at the Zim/Zam border hosts the second highest bungee sight in the world. You plunge 111 meters down towards the Zambezi. The bridge is literally known to exist in Zim/Zam, as it is in the no man’s land between the two borders.  No, I absolutely did not jump off that bridge in no man’s land in Africa. My tall handsome body guard did. That man is one crazy %#5) $*)@#.  I think the pictures say enough, and yes we have it on video. I will add that I was too chicken to even stand on the bridge and look down at him as he fell. I had to watch from a distance.

The jump. In the video, I am saying 'holy shit, holy shit, holy shit....'

The rise after survival

WINNING!

Thus ended our adventures….kind of.  Except that the next day all the buses to Lusaka were full.  Going on trusted advice, we decided to hitch it. Great decision.  Hitching has its own culture in Africa. Some people pick you up for free, and some people charge you, and everyone does it. There are literally pick-up points with 20 Zambians with cargo waiting for a ride.  We were forced  to keep going further and further out of town to escape the crowds of people waiting for a ride, but we finally got picked up in a minivan packed with people. Mzungu effect: we got the front seat, which was massively more spacious. We also got to sit next to the driver, who happened to be the owner of one of the larger fleets of coach buses in Zambia. It was actually his bus that had been sold out that morning.  Only Africa do you get blocked by the bus, but picked up by the owner of the fleet! We were lucky, as we soon realized that it was the end of school and the roads were jam packed with people trying to make it to Lusaka. The issue with hitching, however, is that the police regulate it at checkpoints and fine the drivers. Luckily for us, one of our passengers happened to actually be a cop, so we learned the magic words to get through the checkpoints no problem. As we often say in these situations, TIA. This Is Africa.

And, we arrived home safely. Thus ends part one of our adventures. Here are some random pictures. LOVE TO ALL!

I LOVE GIRAFFES!

On a game drive

On a game cruise on Chobe River

Sunset at Royal Livingston

Sometimes it's the small creatures that are the most amazing.