Cow
The smell of the constant burning wood wafting through the Botswana desert air seemed to fill my nostrils perpetually. My uncle’s wedding was tomorrow and I knew today was the day the men would kill the cow for the festivities. The family gathered behind the rusty fence in front of the animal waiting for its demise. The cow seemed so indifferent and clueless about what was to become of it in the next few short minutes.
As I watched my uncle prepare his gun I began to drift off in my own thoughts. I realized how out of place I felt standing there with the others. They had all seen this many times before. For me it was a completely different experience because nowhere in my small town of Auburn, Massachusetts had there been the killing of a cow for a wedding. It almost seemed a little comical. I was soon startled back to reality with the sound of a gunshot. My uncle missed. A wave of snickers ran through the crowd of those looking on. Others began yelling in Setswana to him and listening to the tone of my uncle’s voice as he yelled back made me chuckle. The cow had been chained to a tree and was motionless and it seemed almost impossible for him to have done but he still managed to. My uncle began setting up for the second try. I waited anxiously as I watched my uncle pick up the gun and slowly rest the stock on his right shoulder. He squinted one eye and shot for a second time right between the cow’s dull eyes. The cow fell instantly onto the ground and a cloud of dust came up from underneath it. I thought it would be hard for me to watch someone take the life of another living creature. To my surprise I sat there feeling entirely content with the situation. To some I may seem heartless but it was just how I felt.
As more men came over to begin carving the dead body, I noticed the crowd had decreased in size and me and my little sister had been the only ones left. We wandered over to the group of men wrestling with the body trying to tie it with rope. They then lifted the beast and tied it into a tree. One of the men then took a sharp knife and began slicing the middle of the hanging body. I felt myself cringing at the sight of the multi-colored insides pouring out into his arms. The stench of the assortment of intestines, stomach and other body parts almost made me keel over. The rancid smell stayed with me for days after and I’ll never forget it. The amount of blood flowing from the being was imaginable and I had never realized how great the size of a cow was until that day. It was one of those moments where you want so badly to look away but you can’t manage to do it.
Witnessing this cow being chopped to pieces right before my eyes made me see it as something other than a living creature. I saw it as nothing more than a food source and I realized that was how others saw it too. Us Americans have become accustomed to getting our steaks prepackaged and ready to be cooked everyday. We forget how that steak gets on our plates. Somebody has to do what my uncle did and we take things as simple as a decent steak for granted. I don’t know many people that would look as attentively as I did at a cow being butchered. But I wanted to see firsthand the very things I underestimate the value of.
Looking back on my six week trip to Africa, being there in that one moment was the most memorable of all to me. At the time, I didn’t think it would be but it was one instance that made me look at the bigger picture of something. I realize the importance of those in this country who make a living out of doing what my uncle did. Without people like them, every family would have to fend for themselves and go through all the stress and work of killing for survival. Us Americans truly have no idea how lucky we really are. To a teenager hearing that we take things for granted is just another thing to roll your eyes at. But going to another country where it is their life to kill for survival and being a direct eyewitness to this made me sincerely consider how fortunate I am as an American.
Seeing the sweat pour off my own flesh and blood as he hacked away at the animal is an image I’ll never be able to get out of my head. Being apart of a family that resides in Africa while living in the comfortable town of Auburn is like being apart of a culture clash. One part of me sits here at the dinner table cutting my steak while the other can’t get the image of my uncle still slashing that animal to pieces.
