Saturday Morning Fun

“Miss! We come to play!” I’d been sleeping, soundly, unconsciously revelling at Saturday morning’s allowing me to sleep late and still had another hour or so left of good sleep in me when they woke me up. I considered shooing them away, but I stumbled out of bed, shuffled to the door, looking like a swamp thing as Brendon, Savio, Jason, Ronson, Karolinie, Shannon and Tnecha marched into the house, full of energy and ideas. Karolinie remarked at my sink of dirty dishes and says “We will wash!” Ok, sure!

The boys putter around the front room as I finally decide I should brush my teeth and wash my face and feed the dog. They discover the little kaleidoscope I have laying around that Tricia and Amanda sent and look into it. “Is just like looking at birds!” one exclaims, referring to binocs – they’d just come from bird-watching with Matt that morning. He and they had gotten up at 6 a.m. to check out the local birds, no way in hell I was gonna wake up to go with them. They look at me through the kaleidoscope and I ask what kind of bird I’d be. “A pigeon,” was the first answer one of them said. Shannon quickly corrects and says “blue backed mannikan,” a bird they’d seen that morning, which I appreciated a little more.

Since Karolinie did dishes, she got to pick the first game and she chose Down by the Banks, the hand slapping game I taught them. Then Tnecha chose to sing “Down by the Bay” and I had them make up their own rhyme for the end. The best one was Brendon’s who said “Have you ever seen a Matt, sitting on a mattress?” (Matt had come back to the house and joined in on some games, then tried to retire to a hammock for a nap, to no avail). Then we play Purple Chicken, a rhythm calling game, first with numbers, then with animal sounds. You have a number or sound and you call to someone else “Number 3, number 7,” then they call themselves then someone new, in rhythm. With the animal sounds, it went “AaaawwWW, Owuuuuu! Owuuuuuu, Onnnnnng!” (macaw to wolf to baby caiman).

Then, they wanted to play cards, though not all of them; two played dominoes of some sort, some played Phase 10 with me and some wanted to draw. Those guys drew copies of Calvin (from Calvin and Hobbes) – Ronson gave Calvin big muscles, though – and Savio asked me how to spell “KARaty” and I couldn’t figure out what he meant until Ronson explained “Like Kung Fu, Miss.” “OH! KarATE, KarATE. K-A-R-A-T-E.” He wrote that on his drawing of some posing, muscly man. Shannon and Brendon really enjoyed Phase 10, we did two phases successfully before we stopped.

They ask me about different groceries of mine and where ‘I does get dem,’ particularly about one unlabelled jar of something Julie had left behind from Surama. Karolinie had discovered an empty jar of peanut butter I was throwing away and decided to rescue and finger out the remains. She licked at it as I explained the jar was a sugar pepper sauce and let them try it which they started to gobble up and asked to eat with farine. I said they could eat it with some popcorn – I’d make some if they would start to read a story together.

The kids go back into the front room while Shannon starts reading, with great pronunciation and inflecion, The Land before Time to the rest (Conrad had joined in by now, Jason and Ronson had left) as I made myself coffee and popcorn for them. Brendon and Savio had one bowl of popcorn in one hammock, Tnecha and Karolinie had another bowl in the other hammock and Shannon and Conrad had a third in a chair at the desk. They dipped the kernels in pepper sauce from a spoon. “You will eat some?” Shannon, who saw I put aside none for myself, asked. “I will share from you all,” and I took a handful from all bowls, while asking them about the story so far; they had read almost 2 chapters. That was The Movie from the boys’ and my youth and I was so excited when Uncle Steve, Jeff and Lisa sent the book to me here. I could still hear the characters’ voices as Shannon read in his Rupununi accent.

They wanted to play more, but I said they could keep reading or it was ‘go play outside’ time. Shannon, Conrad and Brendon left, with thanks all around, but Karolinie, Tnecha and Savio wanted to keep reading, so they cuddled in one hammock (a Savio Sandwich; a 6 year old squeezed between a 5th grader and an 8th grader – only in the Rupununi) as I read the rest of Chapter 2 and all of Chapter 3, about how Sharptooth was trying to ketch Littlefoot and Cera, but Littlefoot’s mother was fighting the Sharptooth; I tried to read as thrillingly as I could. After that, ‘they gan’ and I’m left, looking around in silence, at the cards strewn about, some drawings left, a drain full of clean dishes and spoons of pepper sauce left on my desk. I grin like a fool in love. Who will wake me up to chaotic fun like this when I go back to the States??

The Brown One

QOTD: Everything you see exists together in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance and respect all the creatures, from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope. -But, Dad, don't we eat the antelope?- Yes, Simba, but let me explain. When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life.

(NOTE: This blog is pretty graphic, about a cow slaughter, just so you're not surprised.)

Darren, Chris and Rickford's son walked toward the corral, long ropes in hand, me following. We weren't there just to collect meat, like I initially thought. They talk in Makushi, and I hear 'brown one' in there somewhere. Plops of poop, gushes of pee, wooshes of breath sound from the corral as RJ jumps over the 7-foot high fence, whips the rope around and gets the cow he wants, first try.

The rope is being anchored by one fence post and held by Chris and Darren, and as the cow tries to pull away, other cows run around and get in the way. Some cows, in the excitement, start headbutting each other, others try mounting each other. It looks like a few cows nudge the roped one, others nervously jump over the rope. As the cow bucks around, the boys pull the rope, getting it closer and closer to the edge of the corral. The rope is around its neck and it's breathing hard.

All the other cows calm down and stand away from the struggling cow, watching it and us, as if questioning with their eyes "What's going on, what are you doing to our friend?" The rope gets pulled enough so that the cow's head is sticking through the posts. RJ takes one of the kitchen knives they've been sharpening with a file, and I look away, to wait until the cease of the cow's breathing comes, until the cow is more or less motionless on the ground, right inside the corral. They loosen one of the horizontal posts, and pull the cow out by it's tail, as the other cows come and sniff at the cow and the blood on the ground.

RJ and Darwin first make a light cut all the way down from the throat to the anus, and you can see the hide splitting. One guy starts and one end and one guy starts at the other, with the cow on its side, and they slight scrape the hide away from the body, until it gets to the spine. They make a traced line around the front and hind leg and peel the hide from it, too, as well as cut and break off the calves. They start by cutting the meat that rests against the spine, a long rectangular line of meat that gets put, bloody, into a rice bag. The cow is rolled over, hide scraped away on the other side, the strip of meat from the spine again. A triangle around the anus is cut away, this will be used to help pull out the guts later. Darren and RJ seem to work casually yet efficiently, each knowing what needed to be done, each complementing whatever the other was doing. An incision was made into the calf muscle, for example, and then Chris was called to come and pull; he grabbed the new hole between bones, and pulled the leg away from the body. It was looking more and more like the meat I am used to seeing hanging under a benab, to have a chunk cut off and buy 5 pounds of.

A big cutlass is used to separate the spine till the tail, chunks of meat get cut from the neck, from the haunches. Then they cut from neck to anus comes and guts slowly seep out. So big! RJ feels around what must be the several massive stomachs and it has a look and sound of a waterbed. Branches with leaves were put on either side of the cow, as they moved it from side to side; the hide was also layed out under the carcass. With the neck as one grip and the anus area as the other, Chris and Darren pull out the guts to one side. They spread the hind legs and cut them away, toss them into the back of the Land Rover. The cut the ribs from the spine on either side and take those, too, to the Land Rover. The front legs, the head cut off, to the Rover.

The cow more or less dismantled, I jumped down from my perch on the fence, noting they'll take out the liver from the viscera, and wondering what will happen with all the rest before we go. Dogs were already about. Ryol starts cutting out the liver, but then the other guys start cutting the fat off of the other guts and body parts to collect. And then Darwin cuts into the stomach - WHY??? I'd noted appreciatively that no guts were punctured as they got moved around, but then they cut open one of the many stomachs and it was chock full of half-digested grass that had almost the consistency of the grass that gets stuck in the chute of the lawn mower. Just one other goop to dig their hands into, to wipe off the knives before they resharpen, to stain their clothes.

Which reminds me, as the cow was still standing and thrashing, it spewed snot all over RJ's face, which made him gag and spit and throw off his shirt which made ME gag. I seemed to spend the entire ordeal almost wanting to get sick, but not quite.

They dumped, shook and scooped the grass out of the stomach and all its numerous folds and piled it off to the side. They took the large intestine and squeezed it like a tube of toothpaste, letting the poop plop out. The took the small intestines... and did the same thing... liquid poop, siphoned out, length by length then piled to the side. The liver and pancreas went into a bucket, the other entrails went into a plastic bucket, it all got loaded up, except for the hide, which RJ drug back to the house.

THIS was the Mackeydon I have heard mentioned many times, and have stopped at a few times, but never put two and two together. This is the actual ranch part of K/bu. Ryol says they (K/bu Ranch) come to get a cow when they have a steady set of guests coming in. I'd never seen a slaughter before; it took being a substitute assistant manager at K/bu to see it happen.

I spent 6 days, 5 night at the Lodge, CH's sister eco-lodge downriver, helping Auntie D. McTurk with the ranch there. I helped coordinate other volunteers, answered email reservations for the lodge, helped arrange grocery lists, talk with travel companies in GT, etc. It was quite an experience, which can be summed up in:

The Goods:
kittens!
cream!
coffee!
silence!
mangoes!

The Bads:
caborrahs
flies
implicit decorum
silence

The Uglies:
isolation

A good time to think about a lot of things, like the Circle of Life, the duties of a manager of an eco-tourist lodge in the Rupununi, and the future.

Check this Out

Check out this LA Times article, called "Time to Rethink It," written on May 29th. Click below, it's a link.

Time to rethink it

I came across it while with Diane here at Karanambu, thought you all would be interested.