The Goat

On our second day at Bana Ba Metsi we went out to find a goat. After we had stopped at a few villages to window shop, we eventually found a nice plump goat at a reasonable price. We then had to catch it. We all got into the enclosure which included about 50 goats and kids. We saw the one we wanted and grabbed it by the horns and wrestled it out of the enclosure. We then had to pay the man in the village, the price of the goat was 400 pula (which is about £30) which is not bad for a whole terms worth of meat. We took the goat back on the truck to the school where at Maguowe's house we started the process of preparing the goat. Ben (the german volunteer) volunteered to kill the goat, so after the priest had said a few words he took the knife and killed it. We then hung it up ready for Maguowe to skin and gut. I won't go into details of the skinning but at one point i was holding the goats heart and lungs in my hands - and they were still warm. It got messy. It was the first time that i had witnessed the gutting of an animal bigger than a fish. So i tell you this, the insides of the animal are not the thing that you find most repulsive. The thing you find most repulsive is the smell. As soon as you peirce the bag that holds all the intestines in, you get hit with the most vile smell you will ever smell. One other neat trick that Maguowe showed us was in order to get the left over waste out of the tube attached to the anus, you are suppose to blow air into it. This means that all the pellets of poo come raining down rather like one of those rain sticks you get in primary school orchestra.
So after all this we got hungry. So we decided to locate the liver and fry it up. We must have eaten the liver less than an hour since the goat had been killed. Fresh. Now, whenever we want some meat, we just go to the big freezer in the storeroom and choose the cut of meat that we fancy.