Well not murder exactly.
This is a story about how an accumulation of personal issues led me to murder a chicken against my better judgment.
There are a couple things I like about my personality; I have a wide variety in things that I love, and as such I like to remain relatively unpredictable or surprise people because they don’t expect me to have done, or enjoy, one thing or another.
There are also a couple things that I hate about my personality; I have an insatiable need to prove people wrong when they doubt my abilities. This is doubled when my masculinity is brought into question.
This weekend I was over at a family’s place that I have recently become friends with. As with many interactions with Kenyans, this visit was full of “In your place (America) do you have, do, use ______?” This particular time we were going to prepare dinner and the son upon being asked to go slaughter a chicken asked, “In America do you slaughter chickens?” Which lead to an argument about whether I have ever killed anything, and ended with a statement of absolute assuredness that I have not, and would never, kill anything, followed by my angrily grabbing the chicken by the head and proceeding to take off it’s head in one clean stroke. (To the slack jawed gaping mouths of 6 Kenyans and 11 chickens)
Internally I wanted to vomit but for the sake of saving face and upholding my pride and honour, I continued to pluck and gut the chicken with not so much as a grimace.
Lessons learned: - Chickens can still cluck without a head
-The scales on their feet peel off like snake shedding it’s skin
- It’s ok to let people doubt you, they’ll get over it, but even so, there is odd satisfaction in proving that a Mazunguu can do (almost) anything a Kenyan can.
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