Beef!

This post is dedicated to one of my favorite charms of Krio: the usage of the word beef.

All four legged meat is called bif. I asked my friend once which beef he liked best and he proceeded to list them for me, "You get your cow beef, goat beef, sheep beef, hog beef..." And when he got going on bushmeat the beefs were never ending - and mostly in his local language, so I really had no idea what animal he was referring to. I think five minutes later we were halfway through the monkeys. (My favorite beef name is chuk chuk bif, which means 'stab stab meat/animal'...also known as Porcupine.)

While on Road Trip 3.0, I experienced beef up close and personal. What follows is, a) the funniest thing ever, which translates poorly to story form, but still makes me laugh, and b) exciting news.

Setting:

I was fortunate to spend three days in the second to last village before you reach Liberia, just a few kilometers from the Gola Forest Reserve. The Gola Forest is a rainforest with various endangered animals (and even more endangered timber) dwelling amid its dense, protective undergrowth. I didn't make it there. I went to where they were cutting down the trees instead, which was the same idea, but without the big trees that make rainforests legendary and without the protected species (so much), or so I gather. Now, the person I was traveling with to the village was aware that I am an ovo-pesco vegetarian - not in so many words, but he got the idea that I eat fish and not fohl (fowl/chicken) or bif. He was worried, because fish is not available in the village during the rainy season because the water is too high in the streams for the women to spend the day winnowing their woven nets through the eddies.

The small red outline is Gola Forest area:









"Eh, bo," he told me sympathetically, "So so bif de de ya." Which translates roughly as, "Aw man, we have so much meat here." We had already brought salt, onions, maggi cubes (MSG) - the ingredient par excellence here, groundnut, tomato paste and other provisions to give our hosts, since goods are not readily available in the village due to the lack of road, poverty, remote location, and general marginalisation. I was not worried about a lack of fish. Several pounds of starch and oil at every meal does not a hungry person make.

A) The funniest thing ever:

So, the first night, my host's younger brother's infant son was sick and had been for several days. There's no cell phone coverage in the village, but if you walk out to a nearby field, stand on a threadbare spot of dirt, and hold your phone at the right angle while peering up at your extended arm into the inky night sky, you can get a winking bar or two of coverage. I was performing this ritual, neck craned, arm stretched,while trying desperately to sound patient shouting questions about antibiotic dosages into the speakerphone to a doctor back home. An audience of five young men helpfully watched as I talked to America from a moonshadowy patch of dew grass in "the interior". (Yes, they actually call it that here, still, in a weird neo/post-colonial time-warp.) When the call kept dropping and the coverage seemed interminably skittish, I passed the phone off to a local who was more adept at scavenging for reception. While I stood watching the darkness change color and the flylights (fireflies) dance, I saw a low shape come trotting toward us from the far end of the small field. I tried to make out if it was a dog, and in the murky dusk pondered its gait and tail, before deciding it was too small and was something like a fox...not looking that dissimilar from the ones that used to dash across the college grounds at Oxford, lighting up the motion detectors in the night...As my mind connected languidly from one thought to the next, one of the young guys shouted: "BEEF!!!" making a mad dash after the critter to grab it barehanded.

When the 'fox' or whatever it was made it into the bush unscathed and the 'hunter' made it back to our party, I felt obliged to tell them that I'd watched said beef walk across the field for almost a minute and didn't think to mention it because I didn't know they would want to 1) eat it, much less 2) chase it on foot and catch it with their hands. Add it to the list of things that would never occur to me to do, but might be common here. (Similarly, it would not occur to me to use the fuse on a petrol-powered saw to light cigarettes because I forgot my matches...but the three-man logging team did just that, after carting the five-gallon jug of fuel a good three miles into the road-less, trail-less forest. I of course, watched their desperate display of nicotine addiction from several metres off, worrying they would accidentally blow up said forest.)

BEEF! They shouted at the sight of a small fox and then took off in the night, running after some type of mammal = Amazing.

The kid is okay now, too, but the health challenges the community faces are formiddable: over seven miles by foot to the nearest community health post; people too sick to walk have to be carried by hammock; the only medicine available is that brought by travelling 'pharmacy' merchants a few times per week, who offer their own inexpert, conflict-of-interest laden assessment of which medicine people should take. Need I mention the drinking water comes from the swamp?

Okay, so as a story, it falls a little short of funny, but it was actually hilarious in a context where things are seldom uproarious.

B) Now for the exciting news, which also happens to be a bit morally ambiguous. As mentioned above, in the "interior" so so bif de de. And the area is Mende-speaking, which means translation of local plants, animals, and food items is next to impossible. Asking for the Krio word for local forest animals is futile.

Now, before I go further, I should say this news is brought to you by a few habits I have that really shine when I travel:

1) I like to adapt to and fully absorb local systems - be it putting milk in my tea in England or, well, we're getting to that in Sierra Leone... (The way I see it, if I wanted to live like an American, I would just stay in America; see previous post on code switching.)

2) I like to think I am unfazed/hardcore/a 'jungler'. (This mostly stems from previous item (#1) + overly optimistic self-confidence + stubbornness. It manifests in me driving on ridiculously bad roads, hiking through dense underbrush, refusing to let other people strain on my behalf, etc.)

2b.) As my research assistant describes it in Kringlish: "Yu know us (which) language I really like? Always yu se yu de manage." He nicknamed me 'Manager' because I so often said, "I can manage," or "we'll just have to manage."

3) I like to avoid missing out on once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

I think you see where this is going?

Eager to please and learn the local system, I quickly decided eating whatever was served to us was central to experiencing the village's way of life. This involved a heavy dose of blind trust. After 15+ years of vegetarianism, I found myself putting unidentifiable pieces of fat, skin, and flesh in my mouth whose source was unknown and whose preparation I was not always witness to. Once I decided to myself that I would be okay with eating bush rat and that my hosts would be able to communicate if monkey was being served, it was smooth sailing. (Incidentally, I didn't get to eat bush rat this go 'round and never had to avoid monkey meat.)

The first night was 'freetombo' in groundnut soup with cassava. Freetombo appears to be something like a tiny duiker, though I'm basing this off an image on a poster highlighting Gola Forest animals.

The second night was the tastiest, bush cat in groundnut soup with cassava. The bush cat I ate was something like a caracal or African Golden Cat, again 'I think'.

The third night was the big event in terms of gustatory adventures, *something* in groundnut soup with cassava. Wow. At the time, all I could discern was that they had caught something that has a long nose and eats ants. 'Sweet!' I thought to myself (un-sarcastically, I was actually looking forward to the meal), 'I get to eat anteater. Or maybe tapir? Do they have that here? Maybe just southeast Asia?' When we were sitting around the bowl of soup and starch, however, the dim light of a mobile phone flashlight revealed that something entirely un-anteater-like was what was being touted enthusiastically as one of the most delicious bushmeats: A thick, tough skin marked with ridges like it had scales confounded both my powers of recognition and my eating abilities. I was limited to fishing out the small bits of flesh and wondered, 'Armadillo?...in the rainforest?'

Nope! It wasn't until I got back to Freetown and the internet that I discovered the source of our meal: tree pangolin. It looks like something that would be so cute! if it wasn't so creepy! Kind of like a thick-tailed bone-plated rat squirrel that wishes it was a potato bug and thus spends its days rolling and un-rolling itself around tree branches. Yum.

The fourth and final bushmeat I ate during this trip to the village arrived the night before we were leaving. My host's brother (the one whose infant son we tried to treat by phone that night in the field) came back exuberant and exhausted from a three hour walk from the Liberian border carrying not only the 50 kilo bag of rice he went to go fetch at dawn, but a duiker he found in one of his traps on his return. This was the only beef I saw in its original form and thus could identify relatively easily. My host's brother was a bit disappointed he wasn't able to bring it back alive for me (because he couldn't carry a struggling duiker plus 50 kilos of rice, and thus had to kill it where he collected it). He thought it would be nice if I could've taken it on the road the next morning. I told him not to worry, next time he can give me the live one. I sat in the dark cooking area and watched by the light of the cooking fire and a few flashlights, as my host's young wife began the lengthy and very thorough processing of the bushmeat.

First, the duiker was quartered; the entrails pulled out and meticulously cleaned and washed for consumption; meanwhile the quarters of beef were held over the fire to burn off the fur; then, each quarter was scrubbed clean; once cleaned it was seasoned and boiled/steamed; and finally, fried in boiling palm oil. I think I left the cooking party around the seasoning and boiling stage and went off to bed. The next morning, we were given a black plastic bag full of duiker chunks, which served as sustenance on the 2-hour drive back to Kenema, the main town. After 15 years of not eating meat, I don't really know whether what I ate that day, and the three days preceding, was particularly tasty. I think 'game-y' generally applies to undomesticated animals, so I assume that was the prevailing taste, and certainly seemed to apply to the very lean fried deer flesh I snacked on while at the wheel. The duiker had the most meat and was hence the most easily manageable for a beef neophyte like myself; the bush cat was the most tender and flavoursome (sorry cat-lovers!); the freetombo tasty but obviously small; and the tree pangolin, well, a delicacy I am glad to push aside for those who really appreciate it.

I managed to not eat any endangered species, for which I am especially grateful. And I relatively easily assuaged my vegetarian guilt by reminding myself that I am not a vegetarian for the sake of being a vegetarian, but because of the environmental degradation and deforestation caused by the meat industry and the deplorable and cruel conditions under which animals are reared to be killed in the West. And also because I don't generally need to eat animals to be nutrified. In a village where it's soup, starch and beef, the consumption of meat is both a sign of politeness and appreciation to one's host, and a means of nutritional satisfaction despite the conspicuous absence of fruits and vegetables. Finally, the moral coup de grace, in my opinion, is that the young men who hunt for bushmeat do so in the 'un-protected' forests owned and managed by the community, using handmade traps that catch but don't kill the animals. There are serious problems with the bushmeat trade across the continent and to the US, UK, and Europe, but self-sufficient minimalism prevails in this village.

As far as 'organic', 'free range', 'happy' beef goes, you can't do much better than eating an un-endangered forest critter that lived its whole life in God-given bliss until it walked into a trap made of sticks and rope (a fair match, unlike super-powered long-range rifles fired from helicopters) and was killed by the hand of the hunter whose family will eat it with a swift cut to the throat. The original locavore-ism in action.