Sunday, April 29, 2012

Morning Slaughter


Last week I took the early truck to Lakatoro in order to check my email, purchase groceries, and run other errands. The trucks always leave at sunrise, which requires me to wake up at 4:00am so that I have time to meditate before the trucks leave. On the way, the driver pulled up into another village in a detour. We stopped to find a man standing with a pig tied to a fence. To my shock, the man began strangling the pig. Killing a pig is not a quick process. Of course, I heard it squeal and watched it writhe for about ten minutes at 6:00am. Finally, it died and the man brought it onto the truck. My friends' response has been consistently “That's so Vanuatu!”