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
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| The Village Chicken....Alive |
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!
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| He's psyched |
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| Post murder |
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| That cat joined too...Beth, we put that knife to good use. |
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| Cooks at work..... |
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| 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..... |
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