Skip to main content

Compliments of Johannes and Bruno

At breakfast this morning, Becky mentioned they'd gotten some meat last night. As the plan was for us to eat it at lunch today, she instructed Kenneth to get it from the fridge to show me. I couldn't imagine what it could be that a small bag of it in the fridge would be recognizable. Then I looked closer. Scaly skin. Lizard?

Yes, Johannes (Scotts' househelp) and Bruno (Scotts' German Shepherd) went hunting yesterday and shot a monitor lizard which they generously shared with us.

So today in our pepe soup we had pieces of lizard meat. Actually, Becky pulled out the meat to serve it separately, and I must confess I ate but a miniscule amount. The taste itself was not problematic and the meat was very tender. But the skin was still on it, and there were still some small bones, and I really am a child when it comes to fat, bones and gnurple in my meat. The skin itself was very thin and peeled nicely off the thick layer of fat so that once you got down to the flesh, a walnut sized chunk of cooked lizard yielded only half a teaspoon of meat. But hey, I can now say I've eaten lizard.

Apparently meat was once the domain of men only-women, apparently, would be weakened by eating it and/or have difficulty bearing children. The translators confessed there is likely no science behind this, only a wish, on the part of the men, to save the good stuff for themselves.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My favourite nativity scene

“There’s no accounting for taste.” That’s my dad’s favourite way of explaining personal tastes that are incomprehensible to him, like living downtown, and riding bike in winter. The inexplicable factors which determine an individual’s likes or dislikes are probably the only way I can explain why my favourite nativity scene contains a horribly caricatured black magus, a random adoring child attired – to my fancy – like a Roma person, an old shepherd carrying some sort of blunderbuss. And a haloed holy family with an 18-month-old baby Jesus. This is the "Christmas Manger Set – the Christmas story in beautiful cut-out scenes and life-like figures." See how the 1940s-era family admires the realistic flourishes, like raw wood beams and straw protruding from the edge of the roofline; the rough, broken wood of the stalls; the tasselled camels; the richly dressed magi; the woolly sheep; the Bethlehemites on the path in the background, ostensibly out to get water, judging...

Upside down economics of Jesus: household action and global change

--Presented at a CAWG event in Altona -- In Living More with Less , Doris Janzen Longacre shares a story about envelopes from Marie Moyer, a missionary in India, who was studying Hindi with Panditji. Marie writes: “From his philosophic mind, which probed the meaning of events and circumstances, I learned more than Hindi.” Just before her teacher’s arrival one day before Christmas, she’d received and opened a pile of Christmas cards and discarded the envelopes as he walked in the room. She writes: “He sat down soberly and studied the situation, then he solemnly scolded me: ‘the reverberation of this wasteful act will be felt around the world’.” Marie was stunned. “What do you mean?” she asked him. “Those envelopes,” he said, pointing to the wastebasket. “You could write on the inside of them.” “Chagrined”, Marie apologized and rescued the envelopes with the help of Panditji, who “caressed each one” as he pulled it out of the garbage. This forever changed Marie’s relationship to p...

Broken people...

After reflecting with one coworker on how often churches in all their forms really mess up and hurt a whole bunch of people in the process -- and how "we gotta do better" -- I stumbled into another conversation with a coworker which highlighted our brokenness, and I suddenly realized what was wrong with my take in the first. I wanted the church to be better at fixing our mistakes, or better yet, at not making them in the first place. But maybe this "fix-it" attitude is partly the reason we keep blowing it again and again! My friend recollected an experience when a church community was in a terrible place: compounded mistakes, hurts, and frustrations had blown up, spewing pain all over all parties. (I'm sure anyone with a long history in the church can think of one, if not several, such occasions in their past.) A new Christian who observed all these goings on responded in an unexpected way. Instead of "you people are a bunch of screw-ups! How could this pos...