All Work and No Play

That is not really true. As peace corps volunteers technically we are always working in village, but we do have time to visit other volunteers, hang out, and have some fun. For Saint Patrick’s Day many of us in my environment group went up country to visit one volunteer at her house. We hung out for a couple days relaxing and sharing experiences about village. We all had been in village about four months and had gone through a lot. It was great to hear everyone’s different stories.
We decided to have bush pig, and we paid a local hunter to have the back half of a pig. We skinned it and smoked it over a fire. We were lucky to have with us an animal science major who is skilled in butchering meat. After we cooked it, the meat looked great. It was a golden brown and juicy on the inside. We were all excited to have some meat because meat is a rare occurrence in our families’ food bowls, but we should have known there was something wrong by the smell, slighlty rancid. We thought it was the fact that it was bush meat, but when we tried the meat it had a consistency of blue cheese. Only one section tasted okay. We decided not to risk it and threw most of the meat out. We are not sure what went wrong, but we learned not to let the meat sit overnight and cook it the next morning.


We also learned about a rabbit breeding project for meat. The peace corp volunteer has tripled the amount of rabbits she has in four months. One cool thing she created was beer bottles and sardine cans for water bottles. They work really well and they are cheap.