This is no job for a vegetarian

Every Monday I get a large basket of vegetables delivered to our house from a local orphanage and organic farm just up the road from me, called AMPO .

in addition to the veggies I get a tray of eggs once a month,

and each Monday I get one chicken as well. This is how the chicken comes.

Gah, makes me shudder just looking at it. Now I'm sure that you can purchase chicken like this everywhere, but in the states, when I went to the supermarket, I didn't buy no chicken like this!

When I went to the store, my chicken no longer resembled chicken, okay. The breasts were just nice little slabs of meat. No body parts still lingering around...like, a bloody neck. Or ankles. 

He's still got his freakin' ankles man. Gah. 

Of course you can buy chicken breasts here. You can. If you want to pay $20 for 2lbs. Which, I.do.not! And, Isaak is not a picky eater, which is why we buy the whole chickens.

And, for the past four weeks this buying a whole chicken thang has worked out fine. Isaak cooks the chicken at the beginning of each week, does all the dirty business of taking the nasty skin off and prying the meat from its brittle bones. And I, in turn, don't have to look at the freshly killed carcass sitting on my counter.

Until yesterday that is.

When another chicken was delivered while Isaak was at work, and there was no way I was about to leave that bird sitting in my fridge uncooked and headless until he got home from work 12 hours later.

So I put on my big girl panties.

I gave myself a little pep talk.

"You can do this. You can cook this. It's not that different. Try not to look too closely and you'll be fine. It's not alive. You can probably manage this without ever having to touch the thing. " 

The chicken comes wrapped in a paper bag, so I successfully managed to take it out of the paper bag using tongs and transfer it to a pot of boiling water without touching him. Whew!

After 20 years of being a vegetarian I have artfully mastered the transfer of raw meat around the kitchen without ever having to touch it.

I have unfathomable skill. 

Two hours later I noticed he was still boiling and I figured I had delayed long enough.

The time had come to take the meat off. While I managed to keep my distance and avoid headless eye contact up to this point, I had to look at him now. 

And when I did he screamed at me with his little wings all tucked in and sad looking, "I USED TO BE ALIVE! BUT NOW I'M DEAD! DEAD! LYING ALL CURLED UP AND HEADLESS ON YOUR COUNTER."

Uhhh, did anyone else hear that??? It can't be a good sign when I hear animals screaming at me in my head. It's like the 6th Sense where the kid sees dead people. Except I see dead animals. And they talk to me in their deadness. 

Gah, that is one dead lookin' chicken. Clearly this is going to be nightmarish.

Eish. Looking at this picture and seeing his clawed feet, and shins, and elbows still gives me the shakes. But I had to appear strong. Because the girls came in and climbed up on the island right after I pulled him out of the pot and they were fascinated with what I was doing. I couldn't lose face in front of them....or lunch for that matter.

I'm not gonna lie. It was bad. Real bad. I tried at first to use two forks to pry the meat off of him....but it didn't work. There wasn't enough meat and the little that was on there was not coming off without a fight.

I had to touch it. It was horrible! Absolutely horrible! Having to pull back his skin and there was some weird slime on him! Slime?! Why is there slime? And his heart was still in there. And his muscles. And I kept snapping bones. And his claws.....ugh, they kept brushing up against my hand. It took all the strength I had to keep my gag reflex under control.

And for my effort....all I got for it was this pathetic tiny little bit of meat from this savagely mutilated chicken carcass!

That's it. Big girl panties are comin' off. I don't know if I can do that again. Of all the change and adjustments we've had to make so far, this is by far the hardest. None of them...not the daily malaria meds, the culture change, the language barrier, the security, the no car, new church, mosquito net sleepin', electrocution getting, living amongst bats......none of that even comes close to being as difficult as having to will myself to take the meat off that chicken.

That was rough.

*I still gotta breathe through my nose when I look at these pics. It helps the throw up from creeping up my throat.*