RIP – Bef la

Last Friday I walked out to the soccer field to play with the little kids from the neighborhood and there in the corner was a cow. At first I thought that somehow a cow had wandered onto the property, but one of the LCS students assured me that this was totally normal. Every few weeks, the school buys a cow, slaughters it, and all 400 of us eat if for lunch. Okay. So as the bef wandered the field chewing on grass, the kids played soccer around him and I cracked jokes about whose team he was on and why no one was passing the ball to him. That weekend we found out that the cow would be slaughtered on Monday morning, and a few curious volunteers planned to be up in time to watch. I decided I’d watch from a distance, but I wanted to get a picture of our friend the cow before he met his demise. So, I wandered out to the soccer field at about 5:45 am … bummer … too late. There he was bleeding out between the two goalposts, as a man who had covered himself in the ash from the incinerator (to keep off the blood splatter) began to butcher him. That afternoon when the neighborhood kids came for lunch and to play, I asked them where our friend the cow was, and why he wasn’t going to play soccer with us again. “nou te maje li!” they happily shouted. WE ATE HIM! I guess people here have a much greater awareness of where their food comes from than most Americans do.