Chicken With Its’ Head Cut Off

I have seriously considered becoming a vegetarian here in Uganda. In the US I thought you did not have a meal without meat, it was just a snack. The available meat in my town is goat, beef, or tilapia-dried or fresh. The goat and beef are displayed like the 1950’s butcher shops with the entire animal stripped to it’s muscle. But unlike butchers in the US with a clean, polished counter, shop, and possibly a refrigerator, these butchers sell the meat hanging outside of a wooden booth and take the meat off with a machete—not so appetizing. There is also dried or fresh tilapia that I have had bought and cooked for me at my counterpart’s house, but the amount of work it takes to take out the many bones and the indigestion I feel does not make the fish an appetizing idea to me either. Again, at my counterpart’s house I have ate goat and beef, so after it is prepared it looks and taste delicious. But the actual buying and preparing the raw meat disgusted me. The idea of chicken, my favorite meat, would actually entice me to buy a de-feathered, beheaded chicken that I would try and prepare at home, possibly because Wegmans sells whole chickens so the vision of the raw meat would not defer me from cooking it. However, chicken is not available in the center of town where everything else is sold, apparently you have to hire someone to go into the villages and outskirts to find people who breed chickens, then the person will deliver it to you. Because of the lack of abundance of chicken it is really expensive and you have to kill and prepare the bird yourself, so chicken didn’t seem like an option either.

So other than eggs, the prospect of eating meat seemed rather sporadic and sparse, which made me believe I could achieve my environmentally friendly goal of being a vegetarian. Also, other protein sources are in relative abundance here. Like there is a ground nut sauce that is derived from grinding dried peanuts to a powder, not peanut butter, that you mix with water and when you heat becomes this sauce with the consistency slightly less viscous than cream of wheat. It is a little sweet but takes good with rice or matooke, and it is a lavender color that threw me off a bit at first but now I’m used to it. There is also that nut and a soy nut that you can roast and eat, and beans and rice are a staple meal here. With these other options of protein I thought I would have no problem leaving meat behind.

Yea, right. It took me a while to get over the site of the hanging dead animal, but I have bought beef myself twice and I had the man cut off only the parts that I thought looked the least fly/insect infested and had as little bone chards embedded in it. But other than going to a big city like Jinja or Kampala to eat meat, I have only cooked meat twice in over 2 months which is ridiculous considering I ate meat twice a day in America. The big deal with meat would be my determination to eat chicken at my site. After I had two dreams a couple nights apart completely about my eating of chicken, I felt it was a sign that I needed to cook chicken. So this past week I sent someone to buy a chicken for me. They bought a rooster and a few days ago we cooked it. Obviously I could not kill nor prepare the meat. I asked a few neighbors to help and one of the school boys cut the head off. It was kind of like a train wreck, you know it will be awful, but you can’t help but look. Also, I wanted to see if the expression is true about chickens running around with their head cut off. It is!!!! For a couple minutes the bird body flaps around, jumps, and in general flips out. It amazed me. Without me there, I asked another neighbor to de-feather and remove the innards. It is a good thing too because in this culture, like many, they keep some of the organs like the heart, liver, and kidneys as delicacies. Then over a charcoal stove I used an old metal grate and grilled the chicken—it was delicious.
So there we go, as much as I tried to become vegetarian, it is just not in the cards for me. Besides, the nightly dreams of eating various meats would either torture me for desire to eat meat or I would be so disgusted by it that I would be miserable. But point blank I love meat and chicken too much to become the idyllic environmentalist. Oh willpower…