A Chicken Adventure

“Peace is not a little white dove.  It is you and me.” –Rigoberta Menchu Tum (1992)

This year marks 15 years of Mampuján’s displacement.  This year the government also finally started acting on the plan that was developed for the community’s return to their original location.  This means that there are now houses being built and even people moving back.

When planning the Commemoration this year, the leaders of the town said that they wanted a relaxing day that was focused on celebrating the town, not like in years past when the event was much more focused outward on guests and visiting organizations.  Seemed like an awesome plan.

Which is why I was confused when I arrived the day before the commemoration to help set up and I was immediately sent to help hand out “the meat.”

Nice cutting board huh?

Handing out the meat meant, weighing (94 kilos of meat), dividing (each person should receive 228 grams of meat), and giving the meat to each family (over 100 families) in Mampuján.  It involved a broken scale, machetes, and lots of stressed out people.  The meat part was entertaining, but the real adventure began when it was time to hand out the chicken.

That’s right, it wasn’t just meat, but chicken as well. 

And that was even more unbelievable.  200 whole chickens in plastic tubs.  Let’s just say the smell was not that awesome. 

That's a lot of chicken!

By the time we finished the meat, it was 10:00 pm.  So at 10:00 pm we started the chickens.  We got a system going: someone macheted them in half, I pulled out their guts, and then someone else cut them into smaller pieces to be divided amongst the families (each person got 380 grams of chicken.) I pulled out chicken guts until 1:00 am.  I think one could say I am now a pro…

At 1:00 am, we began to realize that we were going to have a lot of chicken left over; most people already had their chicken and we still had 50 or so chickens hanging out with us. If we left them like they were, they were going to go bad… So people built up fires, put on huge pots of water, and created roasting spits.  Chickens were boiled and roasted until 4:00 am in order to not lose any of the meat.  People were crabby, tired, and stressed. 

And I couldn’t stop laughing, which probably didn’t help the situation.  Ridiculous things seem to happen all the time in Mampuján, and one just has to recognize it and enjoy it. 

Despite the long night of meat/chicken craziness, the day of the commemoration was beautiful.  None of the planned programming actually happened, but it was just as if the people were living in Mampuján like before: everyone was cooking, eating, hanging out, enjoying softball games in the plaza, having horse races, laughing, yelling, singing… It was like a real town.

A presentation of the tapestries that the women sew in one of the few homes
still standing in Old Mampujan.

And that’s what the leaders were looking for that day: creating a sense of community in the place where the community originally existed, in the place where they hope to have their community permanently once more.

And the next day I woke up with my hand totally infected with cuts from chicken bones.  So I guess I’m not that much of a pro...

(The infected hand from chicken bone cuts is another crazy story involving puss, a swollen lip, and a kitchen on fire, but that’s for a different time.)