"Have you chewed the donkey?"

On Thursday I visited the Kyalo family. James has some Kenyan Primary 1 textbooks I'm going to work on with him. Kenyans have a very hard time pronouncing R's and L's, so I was helping James say his colors: Ye -la-la-la-la-la-low. Yellow. Rrrrred. Not Ned. Ned is a man's name in America. He seemed to get that and laughed to think he had been saying something so silly -- "Emily, it is red, not Ned! Ned is a man!" Elizabeth gave me African tea and jackfruit, which I liked. It's got a strange taste.

Last night, Jim and Jenny invited me and Ruffin over for dinner, along with Moses, Albert and Fred, three of the   young men on the clinic staff. I think all three of them are roughly my age. They are hilarious. 

"Have you ever chewed the rat?"

"What??"

"The rat? have you chewed?"

"You don't say that in America. You say tasted or tried."

"How about chewed and swallowed? Have you chewed and swallowed the rat?"

"If you say that in America people will look at you very strangely."

We talked about eating rats, cats, dogs, small birds ("you could fry them like a chicken, but I think maybe even you must eat the whole head, even the what? The bones.") camels, chameleons (in a stew or something??) and donkeys.

Fred said that on the radio that day they were offering 5,000 shillings (about 2 dollars) to a caller who could answer this question: If the man is the head of the family, the woman is the what? Fred put the question to us. Jim told him he should call in and say the woman is the body, because Christ is the head of the church and the church is the body. We also considered the neck (she turns the man any direction she wants!) or the heart. Apparently one person called in and said the tail (?!). The callers had such a hard time answering the question that they were going to continue the discussion on the radio the next day. Jenny said that here in Karamoja the men say that women have ears on the "buntocks" (as they call it) so you must beat them in order to make them listen. Women are not very respected here, but believe me, they do must of the work.