June 8, 2013
WARNING: Some of the photos in this post clearly depict sheep-slaughtering.
Yesterday after breakfast,
Rakhat informed me that we’d been invited to our neighbor’s in order to
slaughter a sheep in celebration of the birth of his first grandchild (a
granddaughter). The fellow across the street – a 77 year old man named Jumabek,
or “George” as he told me to call him “but not Bush!” – is a distant cousin of
Altynbek, and quite a jovial fellow. He seemed just as excited about the birth
of his granddaughter as he was to be able to ask me questions about the US.
(“Is it true that there are mostly black people living in Washington DC?” “Did
you know that there are a lot of Kyrgyz living in Chicago?” “What is the
weather like in Orlando?” etc.) He even pulled out an old encyclopedia so that
he could locate Orlando on the map and so he could look up the entry on the
city (which essentially said that we have citrus trees and Disney World – still
fairly accurate, even if the encyclopedia was from the early 1980s).
The sheep slaughtering was a
fairly quick process (although undoubtedly for the sheep not a painless one).
First the sheep’s feet were tied. Then we stood in a line facing west and
prayed ‘omin.’ Then the sheep’s head was held over a bowl and its throat was
slit. Its head was held over the bowl until its heart stopped pumping and the
blood flow ceased. Then I rinsed the open neck with water from a tea kettle.
At that point the sheep was
strung up and dressed in much the same fashion as I’ve seen hunters dress deer
in the US. The one exception to this was that EVERY part of the sheep was kept
to be used. This included the guts. While it was the men’s job to skin and
butcher the sheep, it was Rakhat’s job to clean the stomach and intestines of
the, well, shit. It was fascinating to watch the care with which everything was
cleaned and preserved (including the heart and lungs, the head, the feet,
etc.).
The complete set of photos from this and several other sheep slaughtering events can be seen HERE.
Once the entire sheep had
been butchered and cleaned, Rakhat began cooking kurdak, a fried meat and
potatoes dish – using the meat from the sheep, of course. The rest of us
retired inside to watch TV. Oddly enough, we watched Francis Ford Coppola’s
late-90s take on The Odyssey. (While it was apparently a mini-series, many –
but obviously not all – of the episodes had been edited together into a movie
for Kyrgyz television. Several key parts of the story had been left out, and
the whole thing had been dubbed into Russian.)
Eventually the food was
ready to eat. Now, I wholeheartedly believe in eating what you kill. (There’s a
bit of a problem with hunters in my neck of the woods in the US who hunt for
sport and just leave the carcasses behind to rot, and I thoroughly despise
people who do this.) However, despite my desire to actually eat the sheep which
we had just slaughtered, I was unable to eat much of the kurdak. There’s a
certain method of cooking that is sometimes used here. I don’t know what that
method is, but it makes the meat utterly unpalatable to me. Unfortunately, this
was the method used to cook our sheep. Out of politeness – and to honor the
sheep’s sacrifice – I forced myself to swallow several chunks of meat, after
which I concentrated on the potatoes.
I really didn’t eat very
much. This was rather unfortunate, as after we had finished eating lunch,
Rakhat produced a bottle of vodka as a present for Jumabek. Now Rakhat and
Altynbek don’t drink, which left only me and Jumabek to consume the entire
bottle – sadly split fairly evenly between the two of us – as we drank toast
after toast to his granddaughter, to me, to him to Rakhat and Altynbek, to my
mother, to his children… (To those of you who have never been in a situation
like this, let’s just say that being unconscious or claiming that you don’t
drink at all due to religious beliefs are really the only ways to avoid shot
after shot…)
When we returned home, my
goal was to stagger up the stairs without falling and then to pass out.
Unfortunately, in front of our gate were two local elderly women (one of whom
I’d met before, although I can’t for the life of me remember where – At the school?
One of the stores? At Rakhat and Altynbek’s?) and five students from the
school! They weren’t any of my
students – thank goodness – but they all see me around regularly, and had
obviously come over for the express purpose of visiting me. I, meanwhile, was
in absolutely no shape to socialize with anyone. It took all of my willpower to
keep myself upright and my eyes open during the course of their 30 minute
visit. I’m sure it was pretty obvious that I was a good twelve or so sheets to
the wind. Sigh.
After they left, I stumbled
upstairs and promptly passed out.
(I later learned that one of
my good friends had given birth to her daughter at approximately the same time
that Jumabek’s granddaughter was born. I count this as my celebration of the
birth of my friend’s baby!)
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