“In Kenya, when you have a guest and you love them, you show that love by slaughtering for them.” This is what my host mom, Momma Mary, explained to me within just an hour of meeting me. I had arrived on Saturday in the late morning, and from the very start I was treated as a guest in the house. After showing me around the house and giving me a key and lock to my room, Momma Mary insisted that I sit in the dining/living room and relax while she and her daughter Grace (14) prepared lunch. She also explained, as stated, that it was Kenyan culture to slaughter a chicken for a guest, and that she would slaughter one of her own hens that night for dinner.
The dining/living room I waited in was very comfortable. It is one of five rooms in the house: my bedroom, the parents’ bedroom, a kitchen, and “bathroom” are the others. The living room has several couches around the perimeter of the room, a short table in the center, and a television in the corner. I sat with the host dad as we talked for a while (and although he has good English, I understood only some of what he was saying). Meanwhile I kept thinking about how our FSD program leaders repeatedly told us we needed to be part of the family, not guests, and how we- or rather the girls- should be helping out around the house. (Gender roles are more traditional in Kenya.) But since, after multiple requests, my host mom insisted that I relax and that I could help cook dinner, I stayed seated in the living room.
Cooking meals is a rather long ordeal, and when my host dad ran out of things to talk about we both watched the TV that is almost always turned on. After lunch was served, we ate mostly in silence or the others spoke Swahili, with only a few English conversations. (All the more reason to learn the language!) I don’t really see it as a language barrier, since almost everyone I’ve encountered is fluent in English. But out of cultural respect and as a personal challenge, I will try to practice Swahili whenever possible.
After lunch I went to town with my host mom and one of her other daughters, Diana. My host mom and dad have 5 kids, 3 girls and two boys, and I’ve only met two, Diana and Grace. Diana is in her 20s, married, and has a two-year-old daughter who stays with her grandparents. The girl’s name is Sasha, but her nickname is “Zungu” (short for “mzungu” because of her light appearance as a newborn), so now there are two Zungus in the house. Anyways, Diana, Momma Mary, and I went to town on bodabodas and they showed me around a little between stops at various supermarkets. It was really nice to already be familiar with the transportation and the town as almost everything else throughout the day was new and unfamiliar.
When we got back it was time for me to start learning. “And now we will slaughter the hen,” Momma Mary explained as she had Grace pick one of the seven chickens the family owns. I considered sparing you the details, but since this my only form of record-keeping for this trip, here it goes. My host mom took the hen into the small kitchen and pinned it to the floor using her feet, the wings under one foot and the talons beneath the other. A small tin plate was positioned underneath the hen’s neck and one of my host mom’s hands was holding its head still as it struggled violently. Meanwhile I was crouching nervously right next to the hen with Zungu beside me, unfazed. My host mom plucked out some of the feathers from the hen’s neck while she explained “this is the way we do it in Africa.” Time for the knife. Momma Mary took the knife in her open hand and made a good cut- maybe a third of the way through. Blood ran out onto the tin plate for about a minute, and as it slowed, the chicken stopped struggling. “Now, it is dead.” (Whew, hard part’s over.) She placed the chicken in a pot of boiling water to make it easier to pluck off all the feathers and peel away the outer layer of the talons and the beak. Once the plucking was finished, the hen was briefly roasted above a pot that held a charcoal fire. Its skin was seared to dry it out so the family could eat half for dinner and save the other half for a day or two. Then it was time to gut the chicken, which I chose to look at exactly like a biology dissection, minus the smell of formaldehyde plus a slightly less precise instrument (think forceps vs. 4-inch butcher knife). Momma Mary sliced the chicken open in half and used her bare hands to take out the guts to feed to the dog (after cooking them of course, as you don’t want your guard dog to start eating raw, live chickens.) The rest was for us, except the blood, which was lapped up by the house cat. The chicken would be cooked later, but it was then time to take tea. I stood up and found my legs shaking slightly and wasn’t exactly sure if it was from watching the whole process or squatting for so long. But like I said, I was here to learn, not to be a guest, and I was certainly learning the African way of life.
The rest of the past two days have been full of plenty of new experiences (and a lot of patience on the ends of both “guest” and host). I’ve used a pit latrine in the pitch-black darkness. I’ve attended an almost 4 hour church service conducted in a different language. I’ve tasted the guts of a fish. I’ve learned to enjoy a cup of hot tea. I’m still working on establishing myself as a responsible family member rather than guest. And I’m ready to approach the next 8 weeks I’ll have with this family with an open mind and patience. And an appetite for chicken.
