First meal of my Peace Corps experience

I remember when I thought about the likenesses
and the differences of meat. The taste and its texture.
(Not that I miss my Mother’s cooking at all! At least
then, I knew, what I was eating.)

Here, there was no telling.

Take for example, this cat. You see a grayish shadow with bright eyes that penetrate your soul. Others see an ingredient for a meat sauce. Something as small as this, could feed a village. A cook, feeling the soft fur, as her knife carves open the flesh, skimming the cat guts to the dirt floor.

Later, in lamp light, men squat, huddled in a circle to eat around a platter of rice and meat sauce. As we start to eat, with an exaggerated motion, a piece of meat covered in green sauce is rolled towards me. As my host rolls the meat, his lips are pursed, as he says the word that sounded like a bomb blast bathed in laughter, because he accentuated the “p,” in the word, “puss,” and then the men all meowed softly.

I was eating cat sauce with rice with my right hand in a busy silence of men mingled with a foreign language and a burst of laughter!