This Namibian Life

Friday
While rummaging in the refrigerator for milk on Friday morning, I stumbled upon a sheep head, feet, and various innards in a plastic bowl. By this point, finding sheep heads places other than attached to sheep is not really unusual; I would venture to guess that at any given time, the proportion of Namibian refrigerators that contain at least one sheep head is probably pretty high. The procedure for dealing with such discoveries past one's first month in Namibia is straightforward: move the sheep head, along with the accompanying receptacle for catching sheep-head drippings, out of your way and continue your search for more familiar food products.

What was unusual was the question that my 73-year-old host aunt, Auntie Tina, posed to me at lunch that afternoon. “Liz,” she asked me, “are you game for smiley tonight?”

“Am I game for smiley tonight?” Am I game for smiley tonight? As I sat there, with my entire family looking expectantly at me, two questions entered my mind. Who or what is smiley, and where did Auntie Tina learn to use “game” as a verb?

And then Sai, my 13-year-old host brother, pointed to the bowl of sheep parts, now sitting on the counter next to the sink, and an entirely different question popped into my head. Am I game for smiley tonight?

Oh boy.

I was torn between my desire to be open to new experiences and my lack of desire to eat a sheep's head (or feet, or intestines), and so I took a moment to try and formulate an appropriate answer, all eyes still on me. Okay. On the one hand, this family is by now very much accustomed to having Americans come to stay – I'm the third Peace Corps Volunteer at The Farm – but even taking that fact into consideration, it still seems rude to vocalize my gut reaction to the proposed menu. What do I do? How do I walk the fine line between being culturally sensitive and not finding a boiled sheep head staring up at me during dinner tonight?

An eternity later, I managed to come up with what I felt was a pretty diplomatic response. “Okay,” I told them, “I think it's important for me to try new things while I'm here. So yes, I am game for smiley. But you all have to promise me one thing: that you won't tell me what part of the sheep I'm eating until I've decided whether I like it or not.” They agreed that this was fair, and I, somewhat laboriously, finished my non-sheep-based lunch while trying not to listen to Sai's description of the various intestines that would be a part of the evening meal.

Friday Night
It's about time they introduced an elaborate murder plotline to Lorenzo's Wife. And here I was thinking that the heyday of soap operas ended when Passions got canceled. (Isn't that the one where the one lady – Marlena, I think was her name? - was a serial killer, but for some reason nobody in town could figure it out? And with the witches? And those two brothers who never knew which of them was the father of someone's baby?)

I am not going to lie to you, there are many weekdays where knowing that I have a new episode of Lorenzo's Wife waiting for me is the only thing that gets me through the day. When I'm short on patience with my learners, it's nice to be able to picture myself at home, parked in front of the television in my sweatpants, enjoying the mindlessness of Mexican telenovelas rebroadcast in English by the fine people of the Namibian Broadcasting Company. Maybe throw in a glass of South African boxed wine just for good measure. Is it sad that this is my happy place? Maybe a little.

On Friday, though, I could not muster up my usual enthusiasm for the Oscar-worthy (or maybe Desi-worthy?) acting, compelling dialogue (it's like something George Lucas wrote), or subtle camera work that defines the show. Because I knew that when the credits rolled at 8 PM, I would have to go into the kitchen and eat dinner with the family, and that dinner would contain things that I still was not entirely convinced were edible.

Time had no consideration for my concerns, however, and the end of Isabella's antics, Laura's deciet and Natty's naivete rolled around as it always does. Fortunately for me, our guests for the weekend – Manie's cousins from Windhoek – hadn't arrived yet, and so I still had time to reflect on my life prior to when I ate a sheep's head (or feet, or intestines). Unfortunately for me, I was starving, as I usually am by the time we sit down for dinner just after 8 PM, and I found myself deeply regretting my failure to smuggle a couple peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into my room. You know, just in case.

The family showed up around 9, and we sat down to dinner shortly thereafter. Sai said grace. We passed around the roosterbrood. (If a more delicious bread product exists on this earth, I don't want to know about it.) We passed around the potatoes. And then there was the afall, head and all. I scooped myself a small, bony portion and passed the dish on. Bite of potato. Bite of roosterbrood. Sip of wine. And then there was nothing left to do but try the sheep.

This would be a much more interesting story if it ended with some sort of superlative, but it doesn't. That sheep part (which I learned the next day was the foot) was not the worst thing I ever ate, but it was far from the most delicious thing. There wasn't any distinctive taste to the meat itself, beyond the spices in which Auntie Tina had prepared it. It was a little chewy, but not offensively so. Really, the biggest issue that I had with it was that for the amount of work it took to get the meat off the bones, it just wasn't really worth it.

They asked me how it was. “It's good,” I replied, trying to sound neutral. I think that not looking like I wanted to die helped my credibility, but it was clear that they expected me to elaborate. “I mean, I like the spices on the meat. The texture is fine. It's just weird for me to think about where it came from, since we don't eat these parts of the animal in the United States. That's all. It's a psychological thing.”

Apparently that was satisfactory, because nobody made any jokes about me needing to have a second helping, or said anything when I ate three pieces of roosterbrood.

Saturday
I don't know why I thought that after Friday's dinner, the sheep-centered portion of my weekend would be over. As it turned out, Friday was only the beginning.

We got up at 6 AM on Saturday, drank about a gallon of coffee each (except Sai, obviously), and jumped in the bakkie to go out to the farm. This is not to be confused with The Farm where I live, which is “the farm” for people from the city (such as it were). For those of us who actually live on The Farm, there is an entirely different level of farm 20 km away, the level of farm where there are actually (live) sheep and goats, and in our case, cows. (The cows belong to Manie's sister, Ousie, who – if what I have heard is accurate – got them as part of a legal settlement.)

Sai had told me on Friday that we were going to “move sheep,” which at the time I did not understand at all, but then again I don't understand Sai 80% of the time, even when he's speaking English. And that's not because his English is bad – it's quite good, really – it's because he's 13 and regularly says things that make little to no sense. Manie explained it in a way that I could actually understand: because the main road (such as it were) to all the area farms (lowercase farms) cuts right past their farm, in the past they've had trouble with animals getting stolen. So we were literally going out to the farm (lowercase) to move the sheep, goats and cows to another part of the farm where they'd be more secure.

This was my second trip out to this part of the farm – we went mid-week when I was here for site visit back in September – and it was pretty much the same as the first time. Manie talked to the farmhands, Sai chased some goats, and I watched sheep got stuck in the fence.

(Question from Mom: Are sheep in fact the dumb and generally irredeemable creatures portrayed in Bellweather [my second-favorite Connie Willis novel] or just mildly retarded as in Babe? Answer: These sheep can barely muster the collective intelligence to get out of their pen when we open the gate and chase them out, let alone to storm Management and eat Romantic Bride Barbie. Connie Willis gave the species WAY too much credit. And they are certainly not smart enough to come up with a secret password.)

So we chased the sheep and their slightly-more-intelligent goat cousins out of the pen, jumped back in the truck and drove out to the main farm. Truly, I have no idea how the animals managed to find us there that afternoon – the evidence is strongly against them being able to figure out the way – but find us they did.

The main farm consists of a couple of small outbuildings – storage sheds, a cold room, and a few others that I don't know the function of – and the farmhouse itself, which though small could comfortably sleep at least 10 people. When we got there, Manie's cousin Boetie and a few other guys (who may work at the farm, I'm not certain) were already working on carving up the first of approximately a dozen sheep we would slaughter that day.

I use the term “we” loosely; I myself did not do any slaughtering. Honestly, what I mostly did was make coffee (according to the precise Nescafe to sugar to milk ratio specified by each family member) and record the weights of each sheep carcass. It's not that I was completely horrified by the whole process; on the contrary, it was actually much less shocking than I originally thought I'd find it. It was more that these people have all been doing this sort of thing for years now – most for longer than I've been alive – and they really have it down to a science.
The guys would go out to the sheep pen and bring an animal into the main yard. One or two people would hold down the sheep while a someone else cut the neck; this is important, because those things do an awful lot of writhing around while they are being disposed of. (And in some cases, even after they've been disposed of, we had a few that were still doing quite a bit of moving on the table.) After the skin was removed (Namibian sheep aren't woolly), the carcass would be hung on a frame and its guts would be removed before weighing. (I did help out with this portion by weighing, recording and tagging all the carcasses.) Once weighed, the rest of the butchering would be done before the carcass was moved to the cold room and the whole process started over with a new animal.

Meanwhile, there was another table where the rest of the family worked with the guts. In my opinion, this was the worst part of the process, since it entailed removing the contents of the stomach and intestines so that those parts could eventually be cooked and eaten. We probably filled at least 5 wheelbarrows with partially- and fully-digested material. It smelled like a manure factory, which is more or less what it was, and at one point fairly early on, when Auntie Tina was working with some or another intestine, she accidentally squirted its contents all over me. Gross.

After I came back from washing up, Mariana advised me not to fall in love with a Baster because if I do, I will have to prove to my future mother-in-law that I know how to properly butcher a sheep. Good to know.

Lunch consisted of a variety of grilled intestines, along with – thank goodness – ribs and leftover roosterbrood from the night before. I will say that coated in braai spices and cooked to crispiness, sheep innards are not so bad; of the four different internal organs I sampled, there was only one (an intestine, but that's as specific as I can be) that I would flat out decline to eat again. Too chewy.

By the time we left the farm just before 4 PM I was exhausted, and I hadn't even done that much (beyond making 9000 cups of coffee). Auntie Tina and I got dropped off at our house, where I went straight to my room for a shower and a nap, while everyone else went to Ousie's dad's house to slaughter 2 goats. Because apparently there hadn't been enough slaughtering already.

Sunday
On Sunday morning I awoke (at 7:30, thank you Namibia for destroying my ability to sleep in) to find the whole family in our kitchen butchering a whole goat carcass on the table.

I got my coffee and excused myself to go watch CNN. There's only so many dead farm animals a gal can take in one weekend.