A little more flavor of life in the campo.

(A fair warning – this one’s a little graphic. And although no animals were harmed in the actual writing of these paragraphs, the same can’t be said for the ones in the story they tell).

The pig showed up strapped to the back of a motorcycle. That was money well spent. Pulling it on a rope the 5k to the house would’ve been less then pleasant. Pigs aren’t the most cooperative creatures. Or the quietest. We tied it up in the shade and went about or morning business. But let’s be honest, we’re in campo Paraguay, so we continue drinking mate for the next hour before getting moving. We’ve all gathered at another volunteer’s site for her birthday. That pig that just showed up is on tomorrow’s menu.

Somewhere along the line the idea that we can cook this pig underground – hawaiian style, I believe we were referring to it as – crept its way into our minds. These things seem to happen as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Something along the lines of:

“Let’s have a barbeque for your birthday!”
“Yeah! That’ll be sweet. We can get a pig!”
“Yeah! And we can cook it underground.”
“Like a luau!”
“Definitely. Let’s do it!”
“Ever done that before?”
“Nope.”
“Know how?”
“Nope.”
“Alright, well, let’s do it. Where’s the shovel?”

And so we started digging. Thirty minutes later I was standing barefoot in a five by three hole up to my thighs.

Time for terere.

A while later we start walking – dragging – the pig to the neighbors before realizing it’s easier just to carry it. It was decided earlier that the neighbor’s house – tried and true Paraguayans all – was a better forum for the, well, let’s call it what it is – slaughter – of the pig. That’s probably about the time it was decided that the birthday girl was to do the honors. “Honors” of course being code for, “stabbing the pig in the heart through its neck”.

I’m gonna blame what happened next on the length of the knife.

Or lack of length as it were. I won’t go into the specifics, but if you’ve never seen a pig killed, it’s not the sight that stays with you, it’s the sound. A dinosaur in labor comes to mind. Call me desensitized, but the sight of this one might hang around – or at least the sight of the letter opener-sized knife eventually being taken by a spectating señora to finish off the job. Only to be later moved aside by another, with a proper sized knife (you know, the kind for killing a large animal), once the damage had clearly been done but not done enough.

At least a dozen of us stood bouncing back and forth between watching and participating in the whole spectacle. The aforementioned stabbing, the blood catching, the hair removal (there really should be a one word term for the entire process of pouring boiling water on the hide and scrapping off the hair with spoons or a not-so-sharp knife), the hanging, the gutting, the cleaning and of course – the photographing.

Who wants to relive this though? Reading about it’s probably bad enough. As I leaned against the timber column of the thatched roof patio, I realized that while this isn’t that gross to me anymore, no one is gonna want to see pictures of this. And then I caught sight of something way more entertaining then the visual “explosion” going on at my feet. The faces of all the people watching.

The faces slowly began to make their way back to normal as the pig slowly began to make its way into a form and color more like we’re used to seeing in a Safeway and less like what showed up riding on the moto this morning.  Time to carry it back – we just took the whole table. The prep was far from over and we were gonna need it.

The hole got a rock floor somewhere along the line. Wood was found. Machetes were swung. And a fire was started.

Meanwhile… Veggies were chopped. The pig was washed. Again. And then stuffed. I won’t even go in to the blood sausage bit – because I have to draw the line somewhere – other then to say that it was made. From scratch. Use your imagination for what that entrails. I mean entails. Some banana leaves and tie wire wrapped it all up – literally – and then it was time to sit back, have a drink and enjoy the fire on a seasonably cool Paraguayan May night.

Peak heat in the pit came and went, but putting the pig in would mean burying it – and the fire. So we waited. And sooner or later got tired. We carried the pig, mummied up in it’s banana leaves, atop two bamboo poles. The front tips placed on the edge of the pit and the back two raised up towards the sky until friction gave way to gravity and the whole thing slid down the bamboo rails like a ship being launch at the turn of the century. Any visions of smashing a champaign bottle were quickly smashed themselves with the dull thud and poof of the mass hitting what was left of the coals. Cover it up. Bedtime.

All morning long – in the time we could find between mate and terere – preparations were underway for all the parts of the feast that weren’t the pig – still wrapped in it’s leaves under the dirt patch we kept sidestepping. Eleven rolls around and the digging begins again. This time with a few more guest gathered round. Well the dirts warm, that’s gotta be a good sign. Eventually the bright green leaves poke through the red dirt and the shoveling goes from excavation to more of an archeological dig. Dirt inside the leaves would not be good. The top of the leafy wad is fully exposed and a hand width’s deep trench nearly encircles it before we decided to just grab the wire holding it all together and just yank. The temperature of the wire, dirt and leaves already has some of us thinking we may be eating a little lighter then planned.

The table is brought pit-side. One two three, up. Pig in the air. Thudunt. Pig on a table. Wire cutters please. Snip snip snip. Way too many hands looking to get in there. One sneaks in and pulls back a soggy leaf. Pig head peaks out. Even if we had put the apple in, it wouldn’t have been enough to help with the illusion of an edible product. As you probably could have guessed, little had changed since we last saw the pig. And while none of us were currently working on any sort of thesis about if it were possible to cook meat through the process of sweating it rather then fully applying intense heat to it, the theory was nonetheless disproved. Color change however, seemed achievable through this method. Although I went for optimism and blamed the new greenish hew on the leaching of the banana leaves.

And we were worried about dirt.

There we stood scratching our heads, secretly thinking if we just acted confused enough by the turn of events that that would be enough to exonerate us of any fault in the current situation. As I decided to involve myself in chicken prep the Paraguayan señoras saw there opening and leaped to action. Laughs were had, but never at us. “It almost worked” they said over and over again in guarani. I look up from chicken grilling long enough to see a seventy year old women, dressed in Sunday best, in front of the table with a machete raised over her head. Thwack. Thawack. Thwack. And on and on. The pig is partitioned – permanently. And placed on a grill over a bed of hot coals on the ground and begins to cook again. Or actually, for the first time.

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