On Killing a Cow or Why PCVs Are Great Facebook Friends

In my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer I've developed a bit of a love/hate relationship with Facebook. On one side, it is that intangible thread that convinces me of the smallness of our world and provides a link between me, my fellow volunteers, friends at home and abroad, and my family. On the other hand, it often serves just as well to remind me how isolated I am from the lifestyles of my friends and family.

Before I continue, I want to make it very clear that I don't mean to cast judgment on society or encourage anyone to reflect on the way they feel or reevaluate their moral code. The points I am about to make don't really have anything to do with that at all.

Peace Corps Volunteers make the absolute greatest facebook friends that you could ever have. If you aren't a Peace Corps Volunteer yourself, you probably only have one or two PCV facebook buddies and if you're reading this blog, it's probably the author and his lovely wife. I don't know if we are the absolute greatest facebook friends you could ever have, I just know that I am facebook friends with a significant fraction of the PCVs currently serving in South Africa and most things that encourage me to comment or hit that like button come from other PCVs and most comments on my posts come from other PCVs. In general I see a lot of support offered to and from each other on facebook. Not surprising really as we are comrades and all I suppose but I think there's actually more to it than that.

Some common themes of PCV Status Updates:

• I did something today that before I came to Africa I only dreamed of doing.
• My work really sucks!
• I did something today that before I came to Africa I never dreamed I'd ever do.
• Cultural awkwardness cracks me up!
• I achieved a victory today at making people's lives better.
  

I don't know what your news feeds are like but some common themes from those who are not PCVs:

• Go Sports!
• Go Television!
• My work really sucks!
• YouTube!
• My political and/or religious views are the best!

It seems we can all get behind work sucking. The age old wisdom is after all that they don't call it "play" for no reason. However, when it comes to the intersection of the others, I find clashes often occur.

One of my fellow volunteers recently posted that she had inadvertently hitchhiked. I know what you're thinking, "inadvertently hitchhiked"?! Yes, that happens here. In many places, the accepted form of transportation is standing on the side of the road that goes in the direction you want to go and waving down a minibus they call a taxi. Maybe the minibus you wave down is not a licensed taxi. We are certainly in no position to demand to see the credentials. In this volunteer's case, the taxi driver recruited support in his effort to provide the volunteer with service and boarded her into a private vehicle. Many of her facebook friends commented with astonishment that she had done something so wreckless as get into a stranger's car. I don't want to speak on her behalf but really this one fits into the "I did something today that before I came to Africa I never dreamed I'd ever do" category and I'm glad she made it there safe.

On my behalf, I want to be perfectly frank that college football, major league baseball, tea party politics, and Conan's disappearance and reappearance on the late night talk show scene are frivolities of which I care little. I don't have anything against these things. I find sports an adequate excuse for imbibing alcohol in the sunshine. These tea party folks sound dangerously ignorant and popular to me and I think Conan O'Brian is a comic genius. If I made these things important to me in a way only facebook could pressure me to feel they could be important I would be completely unable to connect and relate to the situation in which I am physically living. It's as fair as that. For a while I felt that my living beyond the programming whims of media conglomerates and outside the sound bite ridden nature of politics made me a more enlightened person of some kind. When I seriously think about it, I find no compelling evidence to this claim.

A) Knock Knock!
B) Who's there?
A) Interrupting Cow!
B) Interrupting C...
A) MOOO!!!!

This post's title claims to be an essay about the killing of cows. Today, Liz and I witnessed the slaughter of a bull. Yes, it was gruesome, but not so much as we expected. Is it something we would ever dreamed of doing before we came to Africa? No. Has Liz started eating meat? No. Has it put me off meat? No. I am tempted to give a play by play description of the whole ordeal but I don't really want to horrify my readers. I feel like I should give more details than zero because if I don't, I worry I will horrify my readers even more.

Four families each put away R100 (~$14) each week into a common fund. When the fund reaches a sufficient amount, they purchase a cow and split the meat amongst the four families. I'm guessing that there is a pretty serious economic benefit when it comes to buying meat this way. A whole cow for one family would be more meat than most freezers could hold and a huge expense. In addition you get the tail, the liver and tongue and other parts not widely available in American grocers that I am still too scared to think about eating. The part that requires the most skill is roping the darn thing. After the kill, the men immediately went to work dressing. The meat was quartered and hung from the tree in the shade of which the men worked. The women worked to clean various other parts which are not let to go to waste in this part of the world. We took our camera and Liz took a photo of me with my hands covered in blood standing next to a big hunk of beef. It's pretty gruesome, but I have a big smile on my face. While this is going on, some meat and liver is grilled on the spot and shared along with bread, soda and amasi (sour milk...which I'm still too scared to try). The only part we saw get thrown away was the hide (because their tanner is no longer in the business) and the skull. There was some heated debate about the usefulness of the feet but in the end they were saved. It seems a good time between friends and for our part, we got about a pound of liver which I am going to try and cook with chopped onions.

Maybe you're reading this and wondering why we would ever go be a part of such a thing. Maybe you're thinking about how this is nothing you would ever do. Maybe you're wondering what all that pedantic crap about facebook had to do with any of this. We took part in this because it seemed kinda like a big deal to our family and they were surprised and amused that we were willing to participate in it. Sometimes spreading goodwill and sharing a part of someone's culture is better in the long run than maintaining your own aesthetics within your own comfort zone and that's enough to make you a lot of things you might never do otherwise.

As for all of that crap above about facebook, I'm not really sure. Part of me just wants to be critical of a social network that only effectively connects people living in the same community and serves to isolate others. Mostly I feel like so many of our experiences here are so worth sharing with people across the world but facebook and even this blog fail to give an effective context for this. I don't know if it is perhaps that these experiences can be too fantastic, too depressing, too foreign or in this case, too gruesome or is it as simple as the 7-10 hours difference in time of the day.