A Happy Thanksgiving (For Everyone but the Chicken)

(Note: If you are squeamish or dislike hearing animal slaughter described in graphic detail, sections of this blog post may be unsuitable for your little baby eyes. I told this story to a hippy granola-eating aid worker living in Siavonga the other day and she refused to speak to me for about an hour. I was very ok with this because granola-eating hippies annoy me, but I would certainly hate to offend you, dear reader, so, if you need to, please skip over the section marked with asterisks like so: ****. You have been warned.)

A number of people have emailed me recently asking about my Thanksgiving weekend here in Zambia and expressing their condolences over the fact that I have to be over here during the holiday season. Does it suck being so far from home during the holidays? They ask. Yes, to a degree, it does indeed suck to be away from friends, family and Lite 98.1. However, I still managed to have a nice little Thanksgiving feast with my Zambian friends and family…and a good time was had by all (humans).

While nobody here celebrates Thanksgiving and I had to work on Thursday and Friday, I wanted to have some kind of a small celebration. What better way to celebrate, I thought, than by slaughtering a live animal? Nothing gets me ready for the holidays like chopping the heads off of birds, so I went ahead and made what has now become a pretty standard agreement with my neighbors. I pay for the chickens (they cost around US$5 each, outside of he price range of most rural-dwelling Zambian families and thus a rare luxury, perfectly suited for a celebration such as this), they go to the market to buy the chicken (it’s a 15 minute walk to the nearest market and I’m usually too busy during the day to make the trip), I get to kill the chicken and do the major knife-work, they do most of the cooking and we all do the eating. It’s a nice little setup.

****Gruesome Part********Gruesome Part********Gruesome Part****

So, after work on Thursday I skipped home happily in anticipation of my Zambian Thanksgiving feast. I kept my work clothes on (which, as you will discover, was a tactical error) and made my way behind the house, finding the children waiting for me with two large, loud chickens (we ate one this night and one the next). I grabbed my knife and got to work.

I thought I had my act down as far as the slaughtering goes, but I had a little slip up on this one.

Whereas in other parts of the world they may grab the chicken by the neck and give it the old spineroo to break the neck and kill it, or chop the head off with one quick cut, out here in the village the method of execution is by standing on the bird’s wings and feet, grabbing and pulling up on the neck and sawing back and forth with a kitchen knife. It’s rough to watch and rougher to do. I do feel bad doing it. But then I remember that I’m a grown ass man and sometimes out here grown ass men need to kill animals to feed their families and I do what I have to do.

Things went a bit awry on this occasion. Before I had sliced all the way through the neck the chicken spasmed, I lost my grip and the thing started flopping around, with the head still barely attached to the body, spraying blood onto everything. And I mean EVERYTHING. My pants, my shirt, my shoes, everything. A few of the kids from next door and their mother were watching and I think they got sprinkled, too. Yikes. At this point I couldn’t grab the neck and finish the job because it was going all over the place, but fortunately it didn’t take long to bleed out. Man, it was disgusting, even for me.

****End of Gruesome Part********End of Gruesome Part********End of Gruesome Part****


The rest of the process, fortunately, went according to plan. We poured boiling water over the body to make the de-feathering easier and the little kids and I de-feathered. Then, under the close supervision of Cholwe, the 15 year old boy living next door, I sliced that sucker up and removed the insides. As always we had an anatomy lesson, which included a fierce debate over whether two of the oval-shaped objects inside were eggs or testicles, which was fun. And, I had a proud moment when Cholwe took the knife from me to make some cuts, accidentally pulled too hard once and brought the knife back quickly and dangerously close to his waist area. I made a quick but elaborate statement in Tonga about him nearly transforming from a musankwa (boy) into a musimbi (girl) and got a great crowd response. Tonga jokes are the best. My language skills have come a long way.

When the girls finished cooking, we sat out and spread mats over the dirt behind our house, eating and laughing and having a good ol’ time under the stars, crickets chirping and cows mooing in the background. Was it a typical American Thanksgiving dinner? No, it wasn’t. But it certainly didn’t suck.