Goats in the Staff Room

We are going to have a good bye party at my village for the volunteer I am a replacing and a welcoming party for myself. One teacher was tasked to go into town to buy soft drinks so he bought around 200 cans. He took a bus back and loaded the cool drinks into the storage ‘cart’ that was hitched to the back of the bus. When he reached our village he realized that someone had stolen his backpack with his money and ID and half of the cool drinks. At the Friday staff meeting the teachers then proceeded to make fun of him and tried to have him replace the drinks with his own money.

Later in the day at the teacher’s lounge one teacher brought in two students and sat them down in front of the entire room and all the teaches. A negotiation between the students and the teachers then commenced as the teachers were trying to get a good price on two goats that the two students where selling. Mind you, this was happening during school hours in the staff room. The students were tough negotiators and the price was eventually set at 300 Nam dollars per goat (Around 38 American dollars). As this was occurring a group of students were walking back and forth from the river to the school (a 15 minute walk) carrying 25 liter jugs of water which we would use to cook the meals for the party. When Saturday came I walked with two other teachers to where the goat was tied up. The goat sensed that something was wrong and began bucking and thrashing as we tried to take him to where we would slaughter him. At one point we were dragging the goat through the dirt to the tree where we would hang him up in. One of the teachers tied a rope around the goat’s back legs, threw the rope around the branch of the tree and pulled the goat up so he was hanging upside down. We then tied a sort of knot around the goat’s neck, bending it in a strange, almost 90 degree angle making it impossible for the goat to keep thrashing. The next step was to cut off the goat’s testicles and penis. While it was still alive. I grabbed the front legs, Mr. Rumeta grabbed the head, and Mr Mukena did the cutting. The reason for this was that if you killed a goat without cutting off its crown jewels it would secrete some stinky liquid and make the rest of the slaughter more difficult. So its meat and potatoes were cut with a lot of struggling and crying from the goat. Following the castration Mr. Mukena took the knife to the goat’s neck and sliced it open and let all the blood flow to the ground. Oh and we kept the cojones as we would be barbecuing them to. 

The actual killing of the goat was more pleasant then killing a chicken which we had done during Pre Service Training. Once you cut its neck it was pretty quick to die compared to the chicken which struggled a lot. Once it died we began to skin him. Then we cut of its legs. Then its head. At this point it barely looked like a goat anymore. Just some strange headless piece of meat hanging from a tree. This is where the nasty part came; we cut a hole through the soft skin below the ribs and first removed the liver, then the kidneys, and then the stomach and intestines and put it all in a bucket to be thrown away later. When that part was done it became a simple job of hacking off the pieces of meat until where there had been a goat on the tree was nothing left. Next a few students brought a huge leg of a cow and we did the same process of carving out the meat and cutting through bone but with a machete. The result was around 50 kg of meat and a great brai.