The Great Goat Roast

Market in Migori

     I’m not sure how this whole thing got started, or whose idea it was, but on Saturday we slaughtered a goat for dinner. Apparently some of the students had requested to eat goat or something, so our weekend cook brought over one of his goats in the morning and we spent the day preparing for the feast. First some of the girls headed into Migori to hit up the markets. We’d been given a list of all the vegetables, fruits, and herbs we needed. One of our items was listed only by its Swahili name, so it became a scavenger hunt to figure out what exactly it was we needed to buy (it turned out to be cilantro). After a stop to the supermarket to pick up more water, we went to get our last few items: maandazi (a dessert that’s sort of like a triangular donut) and one live chicken. When one of the girls had to return to the market to get pineapple, it became my job to carry said chicken. I’d thought that being a Mzungu in Kenya brought me enough stares and funny looks, but I got so many more carrying that stupid chicken ½ mile back to the house. One guy almost came to a complete stop on his bike just staring at me. The chicken wasn’t even acting up either. She was actually pretty chill.

     In the afternoon it was time to kill the goat. All the kids in the neighborhood who are always hanging around the house joined us out back for the big event. I won’t go into details, but here are a couple thoughts: 1) we all wished the cook had had a slightly sharper knife and 2) it was a bit shocking just how long the goat kept moving. We’d just watched Braveheart a few days before and we couldn’t help comparing the goat, whose name was Wilfred, to William Wallace. We decided that Wilfred had died well, like Wallace, and that he “took it like a goat.” Once he stopped moving, Wilfred was hung up in the tree and the cook began the process of skinning him. Some of the students even took a turn. Meanwhile, the kids were clearly not too disturbed by what just happened because they were still climbing all over us, taking pictures, and using our water tank as a jungle gym.

     That night we had a regular feast. We decided to eat all together, family-style, rather than a few people at a time. We jokingly called it a Kenyan Thanksgiving. Everything was delicious, from the goat and sauce, to the sukuma wiki (sort of a cross between cabbage and spinach), to the fresh mango and pineapple, to the maandazi. After dinner we declared a ban on movies and books (our most common downtime activities since the internet is slow and there’s not too much else to do around here), and played a few games of “Celebrity” instead. It was always funny to watch someone try to explain or act out a celebrity they had never heard of, which happened quite a bit since we all have fairly different interests. Plus two of the students are from the UK so they didn’t know some American celebrities, and we certainly didn’t know some of the British ones, so it was a night of learning (turns out Where’s Waldo is Where’s Wally in the UK). All in all it was a pretty good night.