I hope everyone had an excellent Halloween. We definitely missed having kids come to our house and giving out candy, then eating all the candy that was left over. Unfortunately, Rwandans don’t celebrate Halloween, and we got a very strange look every time we tried to describe the holiday. Honestly, try to describe the purpose of Halloween… it’s really an odd celebration. Despite all of this, we did not pass the weekend without celebration. Tom and Malea invited several other Peace Corps volunteers to the house for the weekend, and we had a group that reached about 15 members. The question then arises, how do you feed so many guests? And that’s how our recent adventure began.
One of the first things we heard about when we got here was Tom’s famous (infamous?) goat roasts. You can go to the market and buy a goat, which is later led to your house… alive. There, he’s had Timo or Jean Claude (our guards) slaughter and butcher the thing, and he’s roasted it over charcoal in the backyard. Tom’s done this twice since he’s been here, and both occurrences have been great successes. He wanted to change things up a bit this year, however. He wants to roast a turkey for Thanksgiving, and he deemed this past weekend as an excellent time for practice. I know what you’re thinking… turkeys in Rwanda? Yes, we’ve seen, and heard, several turkeys since arriving here. Most of the locals laugh when you ask them about “dendo,” but there are a few people who raise and sell the birds.
Tom made arrangements to get a turkey last week, and we asked one of our friends, Teo, to pick it up for us. Unfortunately, when he got there, the guy had sold it to his son, despite our reservation, and Teo had to go to a different town to find a bird. He brought it back to the house and it sat in our backyard for the evening making occasional pitiful noises. If you’ve never seen a turkey up close, they’re actually quite ugly, but our bird was immediately dubbed “cute.” I’ll admit, I did bond with the very American bird, and I felt a connection to home with it. We even named it Turkems. Timo wanted to name it Indestructible, but that name would have been sadly inappropriate. Unfortunately for the bird, several hungry guests were coming to the house, so no amount of bonding was going to save it.
We awoke the next morning to hear Turkems making quite a ruckus. Tom later came to my room and said, “the turkey flew over the wall, we have to go catch it.” So, Tom, Emmett, Timo, and I walked around the block to our neighbor’s house to recapture the escapee. Our neighbors have a bunch of chickens. They formerly had a rooster, which I’m guessing met an early demise due to its tendency to crow every 30 seconds in the morning, starting at about 5:00. None of us were sad to see, I mean hear, that thing go. As we approached the house, there was no mistaking which yard was the hiding spot. There were kids running around in the street and yard yelling, “Mizungo!” which means “white people.” They all thought it was hilarious, and I immediately thought of several movies where some city slicker tries to catch a turkey and ends up in the mud. I brought my video camera, but I think Turkems desire for escape had faded, and we easily captured her without much of a fuss.
The rest of the morning was pretty routine. By routine I mean that a large bird was decapitated in the yard, drained of its blood, boiled in a pot, defeathered, then roasted on an open charcoal pit for a couple hours. The dinner was a great success, and the stuffing and baked beans were delicious. The turkey, while it’s always nice to have meat, was a little tough and “gamey.” The turkeys here are the wild variety, and not the white birds that are farmed back in the US. Despite that, the whole experience was quite exciting, albeit tragic. I’d just like to say, “Turkems, your sacrifice was greatly appreciated, and we will always remember you.” Again, I promise to have tons of pictures of this story, and all of our other ones, uploaded when we get back.
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