The Slaughtered Pig

The list of differences, of describing everyday life, is too long to comprehend, much less write about. All I can say is that it’s the inverse of my life a few months ago. I sent away Sam, the Malawian hose boy who lived with Hercules for 2 years, for many reasons. Mostly, I don’t trust him, and his actions over the past few weeks have not even the slightest alleviated the concern. I felt hesitation in asking, after all he was told to leave on his own accord before I moved in, but he did not. He has family down the road a job in the city come December.

To contain community reaction to my ousting of Sam, I lied. A pure lie; my stepping stone as I tread cautiously through a culture very interconnected, where the destruction of one relationship can mean you lose a whole village from your trust. It’s a delicate balance, never tipped in your favor as a foreigner. While my projects keep me busy during the week, I’m learning that progress takes time. People are busy living, as life takes up a great portion of the day, where fetching some water to wash clothes can sometimes take up to an hour and the washing itself taking another 2. The hours in between are divided between working in the fields and my projects. So things are a slower pace.

I spend a lot time reading, as what else can one do with ample sunlight and shelves of books gnawing at my curiosity, and fixing up this mess of a house into a home. There is a lot to do at the house outside of daily chores, but it’s coming along. I have been poring through volumes of poetry, beautiful works of fiction, and dense non-fiction. This whole world of books and information I had no time for before. I’ve written verses of poetry on the white-washed walls of the house with chalk; Yeats, Mackay, Hughes. I’ve taped up the few pictures and maps I have to the wall, rearranged things in the house, feeling much freer without a stranger hovering about watching my every move.

I made the brave attempt to buy meat yesterday in the market, it was pork. Protein in hard to come by, especially rare in the dry season, we almost never see meat for sale because livestock are considered long-term assets here (for numerous reasons). A chief down the road from the market had to sell his pig, so they slaughtered it in the morning and hung a leg in the verandah as a signal, with a bucket full of the remainder in the back room, covered with banana leaves and flies.

Is it safe? Is it sanitary? Kwali. Who knows. Marlboro told me that when there is meat available, you buy. I took their word that it was fresh and bought a ½ kg. I’ve never cooked pork before. This was no clean, plastic-wrapped, grocery pork. They hacked a chunk off at the slab with an axe, hung it on a tobacco scale and plopped it in my hand.

I walked home with it as Marlboro explained how to cook it. I looked at it curiously in my hand and noticed some of its hair still clung to its skin above a slimy white layer of fat. Once I got home I began the daunting task of chopping. There are no sharp knives in the house, just a rusty old blunt knife left here by my predecessor. I washed the fleshy mess, occasionally pulling out hairs, and then cut it into pieces with difficulty, accidently slicing my finger at one point. I left the skin and surrounding fat for Lucy.

Abandoning wood for the occasional fire, I threw some charcoal on and warmed it up. I pan fried the cut pork with salt, pepper, and the oregano that was left here. Then I cooked a chopped onion and tomato in the remaining grease and boiled some rice. It was delicious; with each bite my mind wondering if I would get tape worms or some worse digestive ailment. But the hunger for protein was greater. I threw on some water on the remaining coals for tea the next morning and to bathe.

Today I had a pack of biscuits and rice left over from yesterday. It’s cold enough now that food lasts a little longer than previous months, when the rice would have spoiled. Every conversation I have with other volunteers inadvertently and inevitably turns to food and dishes we used to eat in the states. This is worsened by the fact that my nearest volunteer is from Framingham. Dim Sum at China Pearl, taro cakes, tofu rolls with shrimp paste, molten chocolate lava cake, cheese cake, sushi, hell even a bag of chips or some chocolates or easy mac or instant oatmeal, and even Skittles (which I hated in the states, have now found their way into my affections). Onions are usually on sale here, if lucky tomatoes too, but that’s it.