A few years back I went with a few Yanks on a road trip for Thanksgiving
Basically we were north of the Gambia in a place called Niokolokoba. The girls had baked loads of cookies and cakes and bread and good stuff so we decided that the blokes would sort out a BBQ for the night of camping out in the middle of a massive Natioanl Reserve with lions'n'that. So in the morning we drove out to the nearest town and found the market. Cos I was the only one who spoke more that two words of the local lingo I was tasked with getting the meat. The others would get stuff for salads and as we had no skewers we had decided on bicycle spokes for our kebabs.
So I eventually find the butchers in the middle of a sweltering seething fly blown market. It's a concrete shack with three heads on the table, one of a goat, one of a sheep and one of a cow. They do this so you can see how fresh the meat is. The other thing on the table is a big bit of tree that is used as a chopping block and a big fuck off dirty great filthy chopper knife. The butch is wearing the dirtiest apron I've ever seen. A mechanic would have been proud of it. He's got blood and slime all up each wall and every few seconds during our fruitfull but difficult conversation about me buying 3 kilos of his finest fillet, well ok just no bones and as little fat as you can manage, ok then those 3 kilos of cow will do, he would cough up the biggest throat omelets and flob it on to one of the inside walls of his shop. These walls were black with blood and lumps of bone chips and flecks of meat and gristle from the choppng but he'd obviously had a bad chest for a while as he had coated one wall almost entirely in lung butter. Even the flies stayed away from that wall and just concentrated on the heads and the apron.
After a bit of tequila, red wine, apple jelly and some special herbs in the marinade it was not a bad feast. We even had enough bicycle spokes left for the Peace Corps bloke whose house we stayed at the next day, to repair his bike.
If you ask me though, dirt is relative and a bit of dirt does you good. One of my kids spent her first few years living in a small village in Africa where dust and sweat and dirt are impossible to avoid and I think she's stronger for it. The Yanks I knew out there had their hand sanitizers and bottled water and were always falling sick and getting the shits. Your body can fight off most stuff. I'm not saying you should leave the meat and chicken out and eat three day old fich, thats just silly but a I'm a very strong believer in what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
(Wagane, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 23:47, Reply)