This afternoon was another cultural experience that was enjoyable or at the very least interesting. I sat around a table with a friend, and several women from my extended host family. We had a huge red sheet spread over our laps with a table in the middle of us. On women would pour a pile of grain onto the table and we would knock the good pieces into our laps and onto the sheet. We would take out all of the mouse poop, little sticks and other miscellaneous materials that were mixed in with the grain, that we probably wouldn’t want to eat later. Later the women will take all of the grain that we sorted to a mill where they will grind it and then use it to make bread at the house.
When we were done with sorting the grain my friend Courtney and I met up with another girl from our CBT group so that we could go to the mini souk (market) to get vegetables, fruit and meat for the next week. It was all pretty standard until we got to the chicken market. We usually just buy a dead chicken from a store but this time we got to pick out our very own live chicken! We went into a big garage that had chickens just hanging out. We picked the one we wanted and the butcher slit the chicken’s throat right in front of us. He threw the chicken in a big bucket for a minute so that it didn’t have any room to run around like a chicken with its head cut off, LITERALLY. He proceeded then to throw the body against a machine that appeared to beet whatever living daylights were left in the poor guy. Or more specifically, the machine was responsible for de-feathering the chicken. From there the body was dipped into hot water to get the left over feathers off, plopped in front of us where its internal organs were ripped out and then it was tossed in a clear plastic bag and handed to us ready to cook. It all sounds slightly violent but this entire process maybe took 5 minutes and it costs half as much to buy a fresh chicken like this than it does to go to a shop and buy one that has been dead for who knows how long.
Awesome.
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