Matando la Vaca… or where steak comes from

So I showed up to work the other Friday assuming it would be a day like any other. (Get there at 8, hang out chatting till around 10, put in a good thirty minutes of work, snack time, put in another 30 mins of work, two hour lunch break, get back and chat some more, then watch novelas on the office tv until 4 when we get to go home for the day. Strenuous, I know.) But no, today was to be an adventure. We had the usual first hour of hang out and chat time, but come 9, all of the men in the office headed out. When I asked where everyone was going they told me they were off to butcher a cow for the mayors one year in office celebration dinner. (I would like to add that it was a pretty baller party idea seeing as the mayor, Don Chepe, decided to put on this celebration completely out of pocket and invited all 1000 people in the casco urbano.) I feel like I should have been tipped off to this by the fact that throughout the morning dudes kept showing up at the office holding carving knives, but to be honest after four months here in Frate, things like that don’t really even show up on my weirdness radar anymore. If anything I was probably just wondering who these pansies were who only walked around with carving knives rather than the customary machete and pistol combo.

When my friend the Vice Alcalde informed me of where they were going and offered me an invite I figured, “sure, why not”, and joined them. I figured that it was a manly pursuit and didn’t want to get left behind at the office, with them all thinking I was effeminate, or a vegetarian (words that I can only assume are synonyms here). Also I love beef but had never taken part in killing an animal for its meat (as a Peruvian Spanish teacher of mine once pointed out, Americans love beef but hate to see a cow get killed), so I figured this was a good way to rectify this incongruity and test my commitment to delicious steak and hamburgers. I asked my friends if I needed to change my cloths out of office attire, to something more suited for the pursuit of cow killing and butchering, and they assured me that I did not. Luckily I have lived here long enough to know that assurances like that are rarely true, and I rushed home to switch into my waterproof hiking boots rather than my dress shoes (and thank god I did).

Note: If you are squeamish or would continue to keep eating beef in blissful ignorance stop reading here.

The actual cow killing itself was quite possibly the most macabre spectacle I have ever witnessed, but was not without some level of dark (ok maybe im just a terrible person) humor. A lot of this was because the guys I was working with were definitely not experts at this (I’m fairly certain that only one of them had actually even killed a cow before). This is mostly because in a mountainous (and relatively poor) town like mine there are not a lot of cows to be had, and those that there are generally reserved for milking purposes, since they are like super expensive in comparison to say a chicken or turkey (or even a pig). Also as we were killing the one cow, another team of cow killers (not sure what the proper term is; Butchers? Matadors?) were busy killing another cow (this wasn’t some lame one cow kind of party my mayor was planning). I can only hope (mostly for the other cow’s sake) that the other guys were more experienced professionals; it might have been that as a novice I was put on the B-team, who knows. Any way it honestly felt like I was taking part in “The Three Stooges Kill a Cow” (though there were like 6 guys, and a bunch more looking on and interjecting with advice from time to time (most commonly some version of “I think you need to stab it again, it’s still not dead”). This is because, I shit you not (sorry about the profanity assorted relatives and family friends), they had decided to stab it in the heart, rather than cut its throat (which I later learned from talking to various people is the normal way to kill a cow). This ended up being quite the production because it wasn’t till we had hog tied the poor animal down, with her left side down, that they informed me of this plan. For those of you not even the slightest bit knowledgeable on anatomy (the men of my town apparently) the heart is located on said left side. This meant that we had to flip this huge fricken cow over, which involved a lot of pushing and pulling and (I know I’m terrible) was kind of funny to see in a really ridiculous kind of way. Also at some point in this process the cow pooped everywhere out of fear, which really added to the atmosphere. Eventually they got it in position, and I will save you the gory details (and gory it was, I still can’t bring myself to look any of the cows in the town in the eye), but they ended up stabbing it somewhere between seven and ten times, and it bled out over a period of like twenty plus minutes.

Then came the really bloody part in which involved us skinning and butchering the animal. Once again I will just give you the highlights, but it was really pretty disturbing, and involved a fair amount of ax work (I believe professional butchers in the states avoid the ax due to the sheer volume of bone shards it leaves in your meat, here though we just learn to eat around them). One new thing I learned from this process is that muscles continue to twitch after you have killed an animal and removed cuts of meat from the corpse (believe me it is more than a little freaky to be carrying a bucket load of meat and realize that it is twitching). However nothing in the entire process came to close to weirding me out as thoroughly as when we discovered the cow fetus… that’s right I just said COW FETUS. Apparently unbeknownst to us the cow was pregnant. It looked like an alien (like all fetuses) and was quite unsettling.

The experience was definitely an unsettling one, but it did have its good moments. Once the all of the work was done we did get to enjoy the fruits of our labor. We had fresh carne asada with chismol (pico de gallo to those of you more accustomed to Mexican food… or cut up onion, cilantro, and tomatoes to those of you not). This was pretty spectacular since it was super fresh, and we washed it down with warm Tecate (for those of you not familiar with this beer, it basically tastes like someone peed in a can and then carbonated it… especially when served at room temperature). After a half dozen of these with my mayor, and basically the entire male staff of the municipality I returned home, grabbed my bag, and headed out to the nearest big town to hang out with some friends. And by headed out I mean I hitched a jalon (ride) with some guys I know bringing a pickup truck load of coffee into town to sell. And by hitched a ride I mean I got to lay flat on top of like 30 sacks of coffee and cling on for dear life on freezing mountain roads in the mist. I have to admit this was a trying experience, especially seeing as I had a belly full of warm cheep beer and basically felt like I was going to wet myself the entire ride.

Overall it was a worthwhile experience in which I learned a lot about my own limits and at the same time gained a lot of respect from my town. A bunch of the people who were there have told me that they are impressed that I take part in unpleasant tasks and am willing to go through the same hard ships as them and also that I just spend time hanging out with them.

F*ck em up, F*ck em up, BC Sucks!

So I was walking around my neighborhood the other day and I noticed that the back of this guys shirt said Dog Pound and the shirt was red, so as a good BU alum and rabid Terriers hockey fan I had to walk over and see if it was a BU t-shirt. Awesomely it was, though god knows he had no idea that the BU on the front meant Boston University, thus he was pretty confused when I told him a liked his shirt and that it was from my University. As I was walking away I realized that interestingly enough this camposino field hand working for my neighbor picking coffee is actually making more money daily than me (the actual BU graduate who spent 4 years and an ungodly amount of my parents money on getting that degree). This is because at this time of year an experienced coffee picker working in the mountains of rural Honduras can bring in like 400+ Lempiras in a day (around $22), while a lowly voluntario de cuerpo de paz averages like 165 Lempiras a day (around $8.50). So what I can not help but take away from this is that maybe I should have spent less time studying and more picking coffee grains and swinging machetes (incidentally I would also be like ten times more tanned and ripped if I had followed this path).

In another BU related story I was in Nuevo Ocotepeque, the closest decent sized town to me, driving with some of my Honduran friends a few months back. We were stopped at a stop sign when I noticed a tall red headed gringa (American woman) walking in our direction. I quickly assessed that she must have been a tourist since she was not one of the other three volunteers in the area. I also realized that she was wearing BC shorts. Of course the only thing I could think to do at the time was yell F*ck em up, F*ck em up, BC Sucks! at her out of my open window. As I was opening my mouth to do this I realized that this might be a weird thing to do to a stranger in a foreign country, not to mention a bit unnecessarily hostile. While I was trying to think of a more appropriate thing to say my friend drove off, leaving the woman on the corner looking at me with a confused look. As we drove off my friends began talking about how hot she had been, and I realized why this woman must have been so confused. She had just seen a car pull up full of Honduran dudes staring at her, which to any gringo living or traveling here in Honduras would not be the slightest bit strange, but with one gringo in the car, also just eyeballing her. I feel like she must have been left wondering if I was just the palest bluest eyed Honduran guy, or if I was just super assimilated into the culture.