The Chicken Man

There are no restaurants in G-Vegas, but in the market there is the Egg Bar and the Chicken Man. The Egg Bar is actually a table behind which a man makes egg sandwiches and sells them. The Chicken Man sets up on the corner and has a table of pre-prepared food which he sells. The girls named him the Chicken Man because he apparently makes really good chicken, but the one time I had gone to him we had beef brochettes (like a shish kebob).

Our supervisor and a volunteer team had been traveling all over the country on a vision trip to see what area their church might like to invest in and continue to come to in the future. They were taking a rest stop for the night in G-Vegas so our supervisor asked us to set it up with the Chicken Man to cater dinner for us at our house. We went down there and talked to him telling him that we’d like brochettes and fries for 11 people and what day and time and everything.

Our supervisor and the volunteer team arrived and the Chicken Man got to our house with bowls and platters of food. We set everything up on the table, paid him, he left, and we dug in. Well, when we took the cover off of the beef bowl I thought to myself that the meat didn’t look quite right. But at this point, I’m used to “meat” actually being various intestinal material and valves so it didn’t really bother me that much. Then another girl who is a Journeyman here and had been traveling with the group asked me what kind of meat it was. I told her it was beef, but asked if she thought it might be something different. She said she did think that and one of the translators that had been traveling with the group told us that it was sheep. Oh, okay, that must be why it doesn’t look so beefish.

Well, I got my plate and started eating it. It tasted a little bit different, but felt a lotta bit different. Just when I was thinking that it might be liver, my supervisor asked the other translator if it was liver. I started to confirm that that’s what I thought too, but my supervisor told me not to let the volunteers know that that’s what we thought because they seemed to be enjoying it and might freak out. Then the first translator, who told us it was sheep, told us that it was actually sheep HEART!

It really wasn’t that bad, but we couldn’t believe that we had this poor volunteer team from America come to our house in the middle of their exhausting trip all over Mali when it’s 140 degrees outside and they were probably looking forward to a somewhat normal meal…and we served them SHEEP HEART. And it was a HUGE bowl of sheep heart. A lot of sheep had to die for that meal. The fries were good, though.