Moo...

Every morning when I wake up in Haiti, I am greeted by the sights and sounds of two friendly cows and a goat that live just outside my window, on the side of a hill that is adjacent to the orphanage.  I have become quite fond of the cows.  They swish their long tails, flicking away the flies as they munch on the foliage and carefully side step the trash and debris on the hill.  Their pen is probably only 50 feet by 100 feet, or something like that.  I am really bad with estimating distances.

One morning, about two days ago, a man came into the pen and untied the goat.  He led it away, out of the gate in the stone wall.  A few minutes later, he came in and untied one of the cows and led it out to the street.  I couldn’t see where they were going for the wall, but I assumed that they were perhaps going somewhere else for the day to “graze.” 

The same day, one of my new friends and fellow volunteers, Mel, came down with the stomach bug that has been dragging so many of the volunteers down.  She spent the day between her bed, the couch and the toilet – poor thing.  Later that afternoon, when we had all gone off to work with the babies, Mel got up from bed and staggered outside to the balcony.  She later told me that she was so bored, laying there staring at the ceiling, that she just HAD to get up and get some fresh air. 

As she stepped outside, she saw a group of people milling about just on the other side of the stone wall from where the cows had been up until recently.  The kids at Toddler House were also peering through the holes in the wall at whatever the people were doing, clearly caught up in the commotion.  Mel, ever curious, wanted to see what was going on, so she shuffled her sorry self down a few feet to where she could see over the wall.

Now Mel is a pretty tough chick, and she is heading back to school very soon to study nursing.  She has taken several biology classes, and done her fair share of dissecting things.  But nothing could prepare her for what she was about to see.  My cow – Miss Bessie, we will call her – was dead, sure enough, and they family of about 20 people were butchering her on a large piece of cardboard on the dirt.  She said after 24 hours of being sick to her stomach that it was about enough to do her in!  So she hustled back inside, away from the gruesome scene.

I was so sad to hear the fate of Miss Bessie, but I guess people have to eat!  We have seen , so many times, a person pushing a wheelbarrow full of meat, flies buzzing, down the dirt road to market.  I can’t believe that is most likely the fate of the cow outside my window!