I’m eating WHAT?!

Last week I was sitting in my hammock reading, when my host mother carried one of the plumpest, handsomest (and noisiest) roosters we own into the room.  She tied its feet together, hobbled it to the leg of a table, and left it there.  Thus trussed, the chicken looked into my eyes like a creature that has seen imminent doom approaching.  When my host grandmother Angelita came into the room, the chicken started to squawk and flap again.  Angelita’s got the blood of too many chickens on her hands not to have the air of an executioner.  I thought she was going to take him away to cut his throat and hang him out to let the blood drain, but instead, she untied him from the table and started yanking down on his neck.  The chicken was not amused by this, and raised one hell of a ruckus to show it.  Finally, she held him by the neck and snapped his body into the air several times, letting his own weight break his neck.  He was still twitching and flapping a bit, but Angelita assured me that he was dead.

She came back with him a few minutes later, and proceeded to pluck and dismember him.  I chose to skip watching this part…not because I have any particular warm feelings for chickens, but because I was too lazy to get out of my comfortable hammock to watch.  That afternoon, we had chicken soup for lunch, and it was delicious.  (I’m pretty sure I’m never going to be a vegetarian.)  Halfway through my bowl of soup, I found a little white thing in it that was shaped like a kidney.  At first I thought it was a bean, but it was too big, and it was soft and squishy to the touch.  I figured that it probably was the chicken’s kidney that had somehow made it into the pot.  I shuddered slightly, and flung it to the dogs to eat, which they did, with great gusto.  (These are the same dogs that eat tarantulas and beetles, so I wasn’t surprised that they found a chicken kidney quite a delicacy.)  Then I continued eating my soup – after all, it was tasty, and I wasn’t going to let some little internal organ throw me off.  I thought nothing more of it…until a few days ago.

I was on the phone with my friend Joanna, who is stationed in Morazon, another ex-guerilla department in El Salvador.  As usual when we were catching up, we swapped some ridiculous stories of what we’d seen/done/heard that week.  Joanna described to me how she watched her host mother kill, de-feather, dismember, and otherwise prep for cooking one of their chickens.  I told her about my own experience finding a chicken kidney in my soup.

There was a pause on the end of the line.  Finally she asked, “What did it look like?”  I described it.  Small, white, kidney shaped, a little veiny.

Another pause.  “Um, Emilie…that wasn’t a kidney.  That was a testicle.”

Is it strange that my first reaction upon hearing this was to say, “I wonder who got the other one?” 

I don’t know; I’m getting weird here in El Salvador.  All my reactions are screwy.  If someone stares at me like I’m an alien for twenty minutes while I eat breakfast, I ignore them instead of telling them to take a hike.  If I find a tarantula while I’m brushing my teeth, I take a picture instead of screaming.  If I find bugs in my coffee, I pick them out and keep drinking, instead of dumping the whole cup.  And if someone tells me that I’ve just eaten Chicken Ball soup, I wonder who ended up with the other ball (and did they eat it??) instead of gagging.

I’m seriously disturbed that I’m not more disturbed.