The Dodoma Meat Tour

So my friend Erick, bus driver from Maria De Mattias, is also a butcher.  For a few weeks now he's been asking me to visit his shop and I've given him the excuse that I am too scared.  I ran out of excuses and found myself on a tour of meat processing in Dodoma.  I talked to Mom the morning of and she told me "channel your grandfather."  I did my best.  It was nuts, but it was actually a lot of fun, and something I will never forget.  Here's the summary:

We started at mchinjoni (the slaughterhouse) at 8:00 a.m. Thank god Laura and I were together for this.  After a brief tour of the facilities (luckily you can't go inside without a uniform... but the goat processing is visible from windows from the outside) we went across the street where there is a market for the less desirable parts of the cow.  "We're walking on hooves..."  Laura murmured to me as we kept smiles on our faces and greeted the people there.  At the market, the feet and heads of the cows are broken down (image: man hacking at cow head with a machete on a tarp) and made into soup.  The horns are apparently sent to Dar where they are processed and made into things like buttons and earrings.  Laura and I enjoyed some cow foot soup (Erick ate the foot, we just couldn't do it... but we ate the broth) sitting across from an inspector from the slaughterhouse.  He was in his uniform that was not exactly clean, which only added to the experience.  After that we enjoyed some chai and chapatti with some of the other workers.  Not really sure why, but the words "goats sound like children when they cry" came out of my mouth at one point.  My comment was met with a simple "yep."

After the slaughterhouse we moved on to see Erick's butcher shop in town where they package the meat to be shipped to Dar.  They had done all the butchering the day before, so they were just cleaning up.  After that, we saw a vocational training slaughterhouse that was not currently functioning, so we got to go inside and walk around.  It was very modern and pretty cool to see.  It was clean at the time, but it was easy to imagine it working!

We took a break then and went to Erick's house.  His nephew is one of my students, so it was fun to surprise him! We looked at photo albums and relaxed a bit.  Then, we headed out for lunch with Erick's brother to a place Laura and I hadn't been yet.  We ate delicious mshikaki (meat kabobs) and chips with a couple of beers.  Two beers (they are big here) at one in the afternoon will get you... We had some good laughs, saying that next time we'll have the beers first and actually go into the slaughterhouse.

Then we moved on to check out Erick's brother's house in a place called Nzuguni outside of town.  A lot of Maria De Mattias kids live there so I heard a lot of "TEACHER!" shout outs.  There is also a small meat market out there where they roast goat on Saturdays.  Naturally, we stopped by.  It was a good thing we had the beers, because then we were served roasted goat intestines.  They serve this with the stomach bile that they mix with salt.  It's green.  I ate it.  'Nuff said.

With a roasted goat meat goodie bag, we headed home.  Exhausted with the smell of meat permeating our skin, we gladly gave the goodie bag to Cristina and Sean for dinner.