Meat Day 4

As you read, we celebrated Ethiopian New Year. It is a time of coming together and visiting friends and relatives. It is also one of the three times a year when most local families eat meat. It is not that people wouldn’t like meat more often but it is costly. 

So, on New Year’s Day, many families butcher a sheep. The day following New Years was a Friday, which is a fasting day in which no animal products are consumed. So, we just had a normal day but got a few invites for the weekend. We ate meat again on Saturday.

It is such a place of honor to be invited into a home and served meat and we were so blessed by it. 

Chunks of bone are passed as well and though we eat everything with our hands, we use injera to scoop it up. When a bone comes, this gets picked up without injera and every morsel of meat or white meat (fat) eaten. Community plates are used and if there is something you don’t want or like, it can be spit or thrown on the floor of the house. Everything gets swept after a meal. 

By our Sunday invite, I was feeling quite nervous about eating 4 day old meat that hadn’t been refrigerated.

The guard at our house was drying and cleaning the new sheep skin as we left the gate. The girls called it a “meat skin”.

Here we were served a feast, a meat stew, meat on the bone, hard boiled eggs and Ethiopian cabbage.

The Littles were so delighted to get their own corn stalk.

We knew it was eaten as a treat but not how to eat it. This was not how to do it.

This boy would peel it with is teeth and then hand chunks to the girls and then they sucked all of the sugar until was a stringy pulp.

They loved it and called it their “sugar stick”.

Some of the kids of the house. Their father has passed away.

Our stomachs were unscathed. :)

And that is the end of our 2007 New Year’s parties.