Beef Here! Get Your Beef Here!

Eating meat in our village, and most villages in which Peace Corps volunteers get posted, is a rare occurrence.  Not only is it rare for a villager to slaughter one of their animals, but the price is usually pretty high in Zambian terms.  One day when I was discussing a Peace Corps program with Ryvus and Ryford, someone was calling out in Lunda from the road.  Ryvus and Ryford's ears perked up and they explained that someone was selling beef from a cow slaughtered that day.  I wasn't particularly interested at first knowing that village beef is usually pretty tough, but then Gina mentioned it too, which surprised me enough to check it out, if only for the experience of buying meat so locally.  I went to the road with Ryvus and Ryford and found a young man with the skin and bones of a cow strapped to the back of his bike.  He was selling small pieces of the cow to people as he rode along, shouting out in what was the equivalent in Lunda to "Beef here! Get your beef here!" He did not have anything that looked particularly appetizing with him, but apparently this really was just the advertisement for people to come to the home of this young man where the rest of the cow had been butchered.  So I followed along on my bike, watching the skin of the animal flop around the bike carrier as the bike rode down the bumpy road.  When I got to the home of the butcher I was the only customer there.  Despite that fact, the man continued with much fanfare to lay out a mat of freshly cut leafy branches on which he laid the carcass.  Children and neighbors came to watch as he laid out this half of a cow for the 1/2 kilogram of beef that I was trying to buy.  Slowly though, more people arrived with their plastic sacs or plates to carry off their purchase of beef, usually in 1/4 kilogram pieces or less, while the butcher took either an axe or a large dull knife to the carcass to cut off whatever random piece of meat he could get at for his customers.  In the village one never sees regular cuts of beef available for sale.  You either get meat, fat, bone, or some unidentifiable piece of organ.  And from what I've seen the fat is often more coveted than the meat!