In Tarba, one of the villages close to Gourcy, I wasn’t given a bag of groundnuts. The village was quite a bit bigger than the other villages that I had been in, and the CVD here even ran a little shop. They had also been incredibly accomodating, and one of the men that I had interviewed had even been a traditional healer. It had been a really good day.
And then, when we were just about to leave, the CVD came walking toward the car from his house, carrying a white chicken. For me. As a gift.
I’m not sure how approriate my first reaction was. Surprise and confusion, I guess. But then I collected myself, grabbed the chicken around the wings just like I learned to do while working at a chicken farm on Vancouver Island, and thanked the CVD a thousand times.
All the way on the potholed and twisty road back to Gourcy, I sat with the chicken on my lap, patting it. It was so soft and so calm, really a beautiful creature. And if you’ve read what I wrote here while working on the chicken farm on Vancouver Island, you know how fond I am of chicks, chickens, hens and roosters. Amazingly funny animals, they are.
But what was I to do with a live chicken? It was a gift, so I had to accept it, but without the proper facilities and tools, I could neither keep it nor kill it. Luckily, the cook at our Gourcy hotel did. He took the chicken and the day after, I and Theo, our driver, shared a chicken stew with bread. It was delicious.
(I know some of you might find this callous, that I sat and cuddled with the chicken for an hour in the car, and then a day later ate it. I’m generally a vegetarian, after all. The thing is, though, that my reason for having a predominatly vegetarian diet at home is for environmental reasons, and because the meat industry in Europe is sick. The chickens here run around the homesteads, eating what scraps and leftovers they can find on the ground, especially around the places where the women clean the millet and beans and groundnuts. It is a chicken doing chicken things, barely having any additional strain on the environment at all. I don’t see a problem with killing an animal to eat it, what I object to is how most of them are treated in the life that they have before they die. This was a happy chicken. And it was a gift. In a culture where traditions and gifts and symbols are of utmost importance, not eating this chicken that was given to me would have felt like insulting the lovely people of Tarba. Like the blessings and the prayers that they dedicated to me would turn askew and give me bad luck instead.
In my opinion, if I can’t eat meat from an animal that I have met in person before it died, I shouldn’t eat meat at all. And I generally don’t. But now I did. And it feels OK.)
Katja Malmborg 