Was That...Surely Not!

Well, bad news. A goat died. Even worse news...I ate it.

Thursday morning I got a phone call that went like this:
**are you coming today?
**yes, we'll come after one hour (meaning we won't be there in the next hour but we are coming today...very precise, huh?)
**Good. There is a problem with a goat'
**What is the problem?
**Amy called me last night. She said that the goat was very tired and restless and that it was very sick
**Well, we'll be there and we can look at it.
**You can't look at it. It died
**It died?
**Yes, I said there was a problem
**Oh, it died. Well, we'll go talk to Amy when we get there.
**Ok, see ya later.

I hope y'all get as much entertainment out of these conversations as I do. Anyways, so we get out there and they are telling us what was going on and that she called over her neighbor Hailey to see what she thought. She and Hailey stood there and looked at it but neither knew what to do...this just brings back many memories of college or of the Sandbox where something is wrong and I call another girlfriend over and neither of us has any clue what to do so we just stand there with our hands on our hips and watch as water is shooting all over the kitchen or something like that.

Anyways, eventually they said the goat got bad enough that it was going to die so they killed it. That's typical because they won't eat an already dead animal because they're scared of disease and some other religious reasons, but it can be seconds from death and they can slit it's throat and that's somehow okay. Anyways, after they killed it they handed out goat meat to all the neighbors and everyone got to have dinner last night.

So we're standing there talking about all this and they say, with pride, that the goat died from eating a plastic bag. They found it in his stomach so they know. I didn't argue with them, although when a goat eats a plastic bag they actually die like 6 months later of starvation, not the next week of seizures, but I didn't want to argue and I wasn't sure how to tell them that in Arabic either, so I let it go.

All this time, I've been preparing myself for something. See around here any time you go to someone's house they are obligated to give you some water and some sort of drink, normally a coke or some juice. I was really worried that, now that we gave all these people these goats, they would be giving us goat milk. I had already asked my language tutor what to say about why I can't drink goat milk...it actually does make my stomach hurt so that's not a lie, but I know that they don't boil the milk and I just don't want to risk getting some weird disease b/c I was polite and drank what they offered me. However, I was NOT prepared to be eating the goat...can't believe I didn't think of that.

After we discussed how the goat died and I knew it was because of something other than a plastic bag, we sit down to breakfast...meat, meat and more meat with some bread. Hmmm. Wonder where all that meat came from. We can't get out of this, there is just no way, so we just have to go for it. I take a bite and it tastes like a normal part of goat so I'm thinking PTL, it's normal. My friend takes a bite from the same bowl and says 'how's that liver?'. I was like 'it's not liver' and he says 'yes it is, I know liver.' And I say 'well I know liver too and I did not have liver.' So then we try to figure out what part of the goat you would cook with the liver. We could only come up with heart. Sick me out. So we're smiling and trying to just keep this stuff down...using the whole 'eat slowly and make it look like you always have a mouthful so you might be able to fake 'em out and make them think you're eating a lot.

We finish breakfast, all the while praying that we did not just get mad goat disease, and then sit around and drink some coffee. The ladies sons and husband come home for breakfast and she fixes their tray from the same pot she pulled ours out of...only they got the brain, one big whole entire brain. No wonder I couldn't pin down what part exactly I was eating...it was cooked in brain juice and that really changes the flavor. You can't imagine my relief when I realized that we did not have to eat the brain, then my horror when I realized that everything I had just eaten was cooked in brain.

Why can't I just live somewhere normal? I mean, most days I love it here, I really do. But then there's these 'brain days' and I just wish more than anything that I was somewhere normal where they eat normal, plain things and don't make you eat diseased goat meat cooked in brain...is that too much to ask?!?!?

I had a really cute picture of me with this tiny little baby goat but, of course, our amazing Internet here just isn't quite up to par today. Oh well, later.