Festas: fun for people, bad for animals

It has been quite the day of cultural immersion and community integration. There were several baptisms happening today (I didn’t go to the actual church event, but I heard that 10 people were baptized at the same time) and for every newly baptized kid there was a festa! One of the girls is my neighbor and another lives a couple houses down the road. As a result, Achada Liton Baixo was bumpin’ today. My neighbors have been preparing for this party for the past couple of days. Yesterday afternoon I spent a couple hours there baking cakes and making mini-donuts (yes, donuts!!!) with my sisters and neighbors. Then, this morning as I was eating breakfast, Matt ran over to my house to inform me that a goat was about to be killed and cooked for the festa. Since week 1 other trainees have been talking about their experiences seeing their families kill animals. I knew I would see it happen eventually and the killing of an animal was something that I was sort of dreading, but also curious about/interested in seeing. So this morning I ran outside to see a big goat being pinned down to the ground by 2 guys and surrounded by a group of kids. Apparently, they had already fed the goat 2 large cups of grog (the extremely potent Cape Verdean alcoholic beverage of choice) and he was surprisingly calm. When killing animals they cut a small hole in the neck and let the animal bleed to death – the blood is used for blood soup and it also makes the slicing and dicing process less bloody. The goat was surprisingly docile during the whole thing. He only squirmed once in the middle. I will spare you the details on what happened because it was pretty sad to watch. Once the goat was dead, they hung it off a tree, skinned it and cut it up. It was quite the morning. The bleeding of the goat was very intense and I had a hard time looking, but watching them skin and cut it up was kind of interesting – they were definitely practiced and they made pretty quick work of it all.

Once I had recovered from that interesting experience, Matt and I went to meet a current PCV at the Centro di Juvenil (Boy’s Home) that’s located a little ways down the road. We hung out there for awhile talking and playing cards. It’s a nice resource to have nearby and could be a potential focus group/connection for my community project. Who knows.

After that we festa’d it up for the rest of the day. We basically hopped back and forth between the two parties. And they were two completely different parties. The one in lower Achada Liton seemed like a local, house party. An older crowd, mostly local neighbors, house was very basic (no bathroom), 1 pot of food. The party next to my house was very posh. The family usually lives in France, but they are CVean and are back for the summer. Everyone was dressed very sharp, the house is really nice and new (running water), younger crowd, 4 giant pots of food (the entire goat was stewing in 1 pot), top-shelf beverages, etc. it was very interesting to see how 2 so very different parties could be in the same small town.

Party 1 (lower Liton) Highlight: I was talking to some people when my mom runs over and says, “Quick, come look there’s a drunk woman in the house!” This older woman had apparently been taking shots of grog all day and she was tearing it up on the dance floor. There is a lot of hip movement in Funana, the popular CVean dance/music, and this lady was not holding back. Every time she bent over all the other women, including my mother, would slap her butt. It was absurd. Eventually she stumbled outside where she proceeded to lie down on the ground and the other women started dousing her with buckets of water.

Party 2 (next door) Highlight: Festa food is the best. While I was very, very sad to see the goat killed this morning, oh my god was it delicious. Goat and manioc stew, pork, a chicken and bean dish and rice = yum. And then there was the cake and donuts and cookies for dessert. I don’t think there was a moment I didn’t have food in my hands (ha).