Blogpost 3

Tomorrow I begin week 4 of training. I believe that I have gotten past my initial culture shock phase of being in Nicaragua and training for the Peace Corps because training days are starting to become routine and I now know what is expected of me.

Last Sunday, I had a couple of interesting experiences with my host family. First, for the very first time I saw a chicken get plucked of its feathers and subsequently get gutted and cut up. I was watching an American movie with my host brother, sister, and Elisa, a fellow trainee who lives with the host family who is neighbors with my host family (Elisa is also from MN) when my father, Juilo walks in through the front door holding a Gallo (rooster) by its feet with its neck bloody and broken. Elisa who grew up on a farm near Northfield, MN told me that the way you pluck the feathers off a chicken is to dip it in boiling water, which makes it easier to pull out the feathers. Since I had never seen this done, I decided to watch my mom and dad as they plucked the gallo. For some reason, I felt grossed out by this dipping of a still very fresh and bloodied chicken in boiling wáter. I think part of my adversion to this scene was the awful smell of blood and wet chicken feathers. It also didn´t help that my host family is very poor and all they could afford was the scrawniest rooster i have every seen that barely had any meat. And the meat it did have i knew would taste very chewy, gamey and nothing like golden plump from the u.s. After all the feathers were plucked off, I proceeded to watch my mom hack the chicken up into pieces with what seemed to be a very dull kitchen knife. My mom told me that she uses all parts of the chicken except its inards, so I went on to witness, my mother tear out the chicken´s heart, lungs, intestines etc. Two days later, I ate the wing of this chicken that on Sunday I had witnessed massacred to death. It was prepared by boiling with onions, tomatoes, and a few other ingredients. Normally, I would have an appetite for this type of fare all the time. But this time, I think it was a combination of the wing still retaining a few small “hairs” on its skin and the fact that there was hardly any meat on this very skinny rooster wing that I was served, but I had a tough time eating the animal. I still had this mental image, very fresh with very real blood, in my mind from when I witnessed the plucking of feathers two days before. Since this incident I have not turned into a vegetarian by any means, but I have a newfound appreciation for vegetarians.

On a Little lighter topic, also on Sunday night past, I sat down and watched Blades of Glory, a very funny American movie starring Will Ferrel. I found it very amusing that this Hollywood movie with Spanish dubbed voices, could be so hilarious for my Nicaraguan host family. I don´t even think, they could understand, some of the conversational humor, but nonetheless, they mangaged to find every 30 seconds of a visual scene the funniest they had seen in years. I think my host family´s amusement with U.S. cultura is fed two fold. One, by their previous conceptions of U.S. culture and people and two, their own cultura conditioning, which in many ways prohibits the behavior exhibited in Hollywood movies. Therefore, they find it comforting to see actors acting in ways that would never be culturally accepatble in Nicaragua.