Toposa BBQ

If any of you are squeamish or overly sensitive about being nice to animals, just do both of us a favor and skip this post. If you want to see how the Toposa prep a bull for cooking, keep going.

I got woken up on Saturday morning by a girl calling my name at the fence. One of the men in a village close to us had given a bull for eating and so I grabbed my camera and headed over. 

This was what was happening when I got there. I was a little bummed to have missed the actual killing part, but maybe it's better that I ease into situations like this anyway...

First they skinned one side...

Then everybody grabbed a leg/tail and flipped it over to skin the other side.

Several people asked me if people in America eat meat and I said yes, but definitely not in the same way that the Toposa do. There is no party, no one puts on goat skin skirts and dances around while they blow whistles...we just eat it. That is an extremely foreign concept to a tribe who values bulls more than they do people so there was a lot of laughter when I said that I had never seen any of this before and that people in my village do not have a big celebration every time they eat meat. 

She was standing in front of me the whole time and was way cuter than the bull.

After they skinned it they started cutting it up for cooking, and then my camera died. Lame. But the answer is yes, I did eat some of it and it was not the best steak I've ever had. But most importantly, so far nothing has gone seriously wrong with my digestive system so I would say overall this "cultural experience" was a success!