Glimpses of our lives

While I was standing in the kitchen snacking on some chicken flavored potato chips (they were actually cheese and onion but I had chicken ones in the pantry as well) I was thinking about the opportunity that we barely decided to pass on. Goat meat is one of the cheapest meats you can buy here. Someone told me that it is common to buy a whole goat and then you take it home and slaughter it yourself. The only problem is that you are not allowed to lead the goat through the city. This means you have to tie it up and carry it or tie it to your bike.

I was envisioning Michael having this goat tied to his small motorcycle and driving through the city. I thought it would be a great picture but economics over ruled my desire for this photographic moment. We found out that it is cheaper to buy the goat meat cut up and cleaned than it is to buy the whole goat. The guys went and bought a 25 pound fish instead. 

I am learning to go to the small little shops and open air markets to get most of our food. We have to buy food each day because we have a small refrigerator as well as no car to carry it home with. A large outdoor market is about 10 blocks away in the heat and blazing sun. The food on average costs about as much as we paid  in Washington. I guess that in their winter which starts in April or May, the prices drop and there is an abundance of fruit and vegetables. Right now it is their summer and the heavy rains have wiped out a lot of the roads so it is hard for the produce to get through.

The other day we were talking with a cook and he was talking about how he learned to make granola. He was describing each ingredient and where he bought them and then started talking about the sesame seeds he puts into it.What  I understood was that you have to be careful when you buy them at the market because they may have diarrhea in them. I thought that maybe this was another way of saying people get diarrhea when they eat them. Then he started acting like he was running his hands through the sesame seeds and said again you need to be careful because of the diarrhea. I was trying to be open minded and thought o.k. maybe they use the bathroom and then run their hands through it on purpose. Who knows, they do things differently here. I became very suspicious that I was not understanding the main idea when he said “ In the villages they try to make it weigh more by adding diarrhea.”

I turned to Michael and mouthed “What?”

Michael said “Sand. He is talking about putting sand in the sesame seeds.” It all clicked into place and we had a good laugh over it. The only difference between what he said and what I heard him say were one or two letters.