Post by Kevin
January 5, 2013
Living in the developed world, it can be easy to forget
where our food comes from and all that has to happen in order for you to have
dinner on the table every night. This
can be largely driven by the fact that there are places in America you are able
to drive up to, order food, and have it appear before your eyes within 5
minutes. Here in Sierra Leone, very few
places like that exist (see post titled “Fast Food”).
Because Lara and I are passionate about the taste of fresh
food, we’ve always had a garden wherever we lived (even if that entailed
investing a fair bit of cash in a large number of quality pots so we were able
to put the plants on the sidewalk outside of our apartment in Columbus). This year has been quite a different
experience because we have a new climate to battle, as well as a completely
different variety of insects. We’ve taken
to asking our 12-year-old neighbor about when to plant things and what the best
tactic is for planting and all in all it seems to be going pretty well. As it stands now, there are two different
times you plant a garden and two very different battles you have during the
growing period. Right now it is the
beginning of the dry season and the first time we are able to plant. This obviously is the first major problem
with planting now, the ground is drying out and we will not seen much rain
until March. So the first step is to
find a place to plant that is near a water source. Luckily for us, we have a well that is about
100 feet from our house. This well was
dug by an American Engineers Without Borders group and we have been assured
that the well will not go dry during this season due to the fact that it is 80
feet deep. We water our plants twice a
day, carrying one bucket full of water about 50 feet from the pump to our
little garden patch.
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| Spoiler alert: this garden came to almost nothing. Our house is not on prime agricultural land, apparently. |
The next time for planting is just after the first rain. This makes for relatively carefree gardening
because you hardly have to water at all, but once August comes around, the rain
is almost daily and comes down in buckets.
To avoid your plants getting washed away, you need to put in a lot of
work at the outset by making tall mounds with drainage ditches before
plant.
As it stands, our garden is no where large enough to sustain
our daily intake of food. We travel to
the market almost daily where we are able to get a wide variety of food (see
Post titled “A De Go Bay Bay”). The
great thing about this place is a good majority of the food comes from local
farmers or fisherman. Because the
majority of the people that live in our district are farmers, it is very common
to be given food as a gift. This is
where Gravy comes in.
There is an NGO that is just down the road from us called 21st
Century African Youth Movement (AYM) that we’ve become very close friends
with. For Christmas/New Years, some
person gave the organization 3 large male chickens. This was too much for the few people that
work there, so the founder decided to give us one for Christmas. Also for Christmas (from our host family), we
were given a yam (not the American kind you are thinking of. This particular African yam was the size of a
basketball and weighed close to 10 lbs, and tastes more like an Idaho potato than a sweet potato).
Since it is just the two of us here in our little African house, we
decided to share all this wonderful Christmas food with our neighbors
today.
This of course means that the male chicken given to us (we
decided to call him Gravy) had to be killed.
The last time we ate our own chicken, we had a small neighbor boy come
kill it so I could see how it was done here.
This time I decided to do it myself.
The way that they slaughter chickens here is nothing like what I
pictured when you talk about it in America.
I always pictured a chicken with its head over a stump and a person that
uses and axe to chop off the head. Then
that chicken runs around getting blood everywhere and causing a great
mess. Here you must be more cautious and
leave as little blood as possible so you are not to attract hawks (possibly
vultures—we’re not exactly sure of the rationale). First thing you do is catch the chicken
(easier said than done sometimes, but the neighbor girls are always happy to
help). Next you take the chicken away
from the house so your neighbor doesn’t have to watch (she raises and eats
chickens, but still doesn’t like to watch them die). You dig a small hole on the ground where you
plan to let the chicken drain. You then
take off your sandals and put the chickens feet out so you can stand on
them. Next you pull their wings back and
you step on them with your other foot.
You basically hold the chicken down in the arches of your feet so not to
hurt the chicken. Next you put your
finger and thumb on the chicken’s beak to hold it shut and you pull his head
toward the sky to expose the neck. You
then quickly make the kill and let the blood drain into that small hole that
you had dug. It takes a minute or two
for everything to calm down. Lastly you
cover the hole and bring the chicken over to be boiled, plucked, burned, and
then cooked.
Once Lara and the neighbors cleaned the chicken, they cut it
up and put it in a frying pan with palm oil, peppers, onions, and tomato paste
(this is called “gravy” here in Sierra Leone—hence the name we gave our unlucky
rooster). This is served on top of cut
and boiled yams—a very delicious, locally-grown meal.
It’s a wonderful thing to be so closely integrated with the
food that we eat and it makes you appreciate all the work that has to happen in
order to have a wonderful chicken dinner.
We expect it will be something that Lara and I will take with us back to
America where we hope to one day raise our own chickens.
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| Thanks Gravy! |
dibs on you guys for any dystopic apocalypses
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