Story #3 - Beef Jerky

Yesterday I opened up my Pacific Coast Brand bag of original flavored beef jerky from Costco and shoved a huge piece into my face cause I was really hungry and raw vegetables like stupid carrots and heaping plates of bland and extremely boring rice plates weren't cutting it for me anymore. Seriously, my junk food cravings here rival the cravings of fat, diabetic, pregnant woman I imagine because I have these serious longings for silky velvety fake snack bar melted cheese and salted pretzels; greasy oily unknown beef? pork? hoof meet? double quarter pounder patties from McDonald's, yummy teriyaki glazed yakitori chicken skewers smoked to a delicate crisp tenderly flaking off as it melts in my mouth type of cravings. It's weird?

Whatever, so I started coughing and then realized that the beef jerky had a dry, starchy, disgusting odor to it. "That's funny. Why isn't this delicious like normal?" I thought to myself.  And yet it probably took about a couple minutes until I accepted the harsh reality that it probably wasn't a good idea for me to keep chewing since I might be eating some kind of bubonic plague and kill myself.

My eyes glanced suspiciously at the beef jerky bag on my table. It couldn't be rotten by now, I just got this I thought. I've been diligent zipping up the awesome, made in America, resealable bag... That coupled with the fact that the little plastic sack of poison which preserves my beef was still in tact meant that my beautiful beef jerky should be completely safe from any dangerous airborn Malagasy microbes. 

However, on closer inspection I realized that the remaining slabs of jerky in the bag had turned green and been attacked by mold and fungi which had ravenously attached their parasitic little roots all over my helpless filets of dried happiness. Horrified, I spit whatever was in my mouth out the window and rinsed my mouth until I was sure I had gotten everything out. Yuck I actually ate a thimble sized amount of that shit. Instantly I thought oh fucking great I'm about to get some other major worm infestation in my intestines which will devour me inside out.

While all this drama and internal dialogue was happening in my head, my little bandits (as I lovingly refer to them), LePop, Eric, and Sariaka,  were staring at me in horror. They immediately sensed what I was about to do before I even did it. They knew that I was about to grab the almost full bag of rotting beef and toss that nasty moldy shit into the garbage. Which sparked a desperate intervention on their part.

Immediately, LePop, a quick witted jokester kinda type, barked at me, "Noooo Cliff! Don't throw it away! Give it to me!" I almost didnt want to believe that he actually wanted to eat this dirty shit so I refused. I also told him I forbid him from picking it up from the trash and eating it. Which made me feel like a major asshole because at that moment I had an epiphany at how poor these kids really are. Inside my heart was kind of sinking as I forget that these kids live not even from paycheck to paycheck, but from one cup of rice to the next. This nasty rotting beef jerky still had value to them.

Anyhow, I ended up throwing the beef jerky into the latrine hole after asking my downstair's neighbor if boiling the meat would actually kill all the mold, which she replied...Absolutely not. I wanted to be sure it was 100% inedible.

I went over to LePop's house afterwards and saw that him and two of his brothers were sharing one cup of rice to eat for dinner. So I gave them an egg.

Sometimes I forget why Peace Corps operates in this country because these neighbors are just fun people who live close to me. They joke, they smile, they pet Snoopy. It doesn't seem like I'm living in the Sahel. But then the occasional reality check.