what's for dinner?

I am having so much trouble uploading photos. I'm bummed because I have some great photos to share...

Recently, I returned home from walking 18km to see the borders of my community in Gurue district. I asked what was for dinner and peered in the pot: rat. Not just rat meat...but the fur, the tails, feet, head and all...mamas, babies...everything. As my host sister ate the baby rats with her chima, I picked some rat meat out of a leg and gave it a try. The taste is fine, but I couldn't bring myself to eat the fur and other parts. It's also not very appetizing to eat fried egg or anything else while I watch my host sister tear the intestines out of a small rat (she doesn't eat these but her brother does), and then proceed to break the rest of the rat into portions to combine with small amounts of chima.

Yesterday I hunted rats with my host family. We walked into a banana field and found a small burrow in the ground. We began hacking the hole with a hoe. Once the girl in charge (lets call her Rosa) figured out where the main tunnel led, she stuck her hand in the tunnel and pulled out some of the dirt. She smelled it to see if it had a strong odor of rat urine. After several dead ends, she found yet another lead. After digging some more we tore dried mapira leaves off of the standing stalks and shoved these leave in the burrow. We lit a match and blew smoke into the burrow. After about 15 minutes of "smokin' 'em out" (ah, at last the words of G.W. Bush are useful...) we hacked through the burrow further. We followed the trail of smoke as it emerged from the newly cut earth. We gradually encountered the first few rats that had died of smoke inhalation. Further on we encountered the main nest where two pregnant females were living with their other offspring. My host sister found an exit hole and stuffed it with mapira leaves to trap the rats. Rosa began frantically hacking at the burrow and then stopped every so often to shove her hand into the burrow to catch the rats by their tails and fling them to the ground, stunning them while my host family scrambled to catch the rats and break their necks. They flung them into a pile of rat bodies, not stopping to count until the very end of the process. One rat bit my host dad (I sure hope that rat didn't have rabies). By the end of the hunt, we had killed 42 rats (all members of the same extended family). That night we boiled the rats and then skewered them on long wooden sticks. We then placed them over a fire to dry them out to save for future dinners. Each family member ate about 2 rats with their chima that night and the remaining rats can be kept for several days before they are boiled again with a little water and salt.

I explained to my host sister that I don't know too many people that eat rat in the United States. She then asked, "so only black people in America eat rat?" I then clarified that not many people, black or white eat rat, though some people eat squirrel and other animals of similar 'stature'.

One of my friends at my partner organization mentioned the other day that some farmers are buying pesticides at various markets and putting the pesticide in corn meal and then putting this in the burrows in the fields to poison the rats...then these farmers eat the poisoned rats, not realizing that that poison bioaccumulates and ends up in their own bodies. Other problems associated with these rat hunts include uncontrolled fires, when smoking the rats out of their holes accidentally spreads into areas that should not be burned. We also uprooted several banana trees to get to our rats and we dug a tunnel of about 15 meters to find the main nest. I don't know about you...but I prefer banana over rat any day.