The Goat

So yesterday was Sunday, and as I was sitting on my porch in the morning around 8am my host brother came up and told me I would be helping to slaughter a goat. I was astounded. Now, I have nothing against this poor little goat (a dwarf goat, as all goats here are), but I leaped at the opportunity to help out. We took the goat around back of the house, and while I was holding the legs down my host brother slit the goat's throat. It was a little weird feeling the legs slowly stopping to fight, but even more weird was the blood splatter that comes from slashing its throat: similar to a coke and mentos experiment with red dye, blood traveled a good 10 feet horizontally.
Next, after killing the goat, it is put over a fire to help burn some of the fur off and to make the animal really stiff and easy to handle (pick up). After Nana cut off the rest of the head, I held the soon-to-be-stewed goat still while he went to work butchering it. Its quite a process, but in the end we had some nice sections and, since we killed the goat ourselves, made a nice little stew with spices and pieces of select meat. Wow, this was actually one of the best tasting stews with bread I've ever had. However, some of the pieces (cartilage, bones, fat, skin) one is expected to eat in a stew - with your hands. I had some liver, some skin, an area around the spinal cord all in a nice little lunch on a Sunday morning.