Being a man...

I've discovered that when you live in Sudan, particularly on an SIM base mostly inhabited by women, there are plenty of opportunities to prove yourself as a man. This week was no exception...

This coming Monday one of our number, Sandra, is leaving us to return home. We decided to have a celebration on Thursday to mark the occasion, and invite all the students she had been teaching round for dinner. This was the main course, at around 2pm on Thursday afternoon:


After much deliberation we decided to call him Julius...

Somebody had to do the dirty work of killing him, and I bravely stepped up to the challenge, provided John & Nehemiah were there to keep me right. Here are Julius and I, getting in the zone:


So we laid him out and, after repeatedly asking John how I was supposed to do it, and never once recieving a satisfactory reply (He just kept saying, "you do it like this, by force!"), I went for it. Some readers might find these images mildly disturbing...



...rest assured they arent nearly as disturbing as the sounds that went along with them. A screeching goat and shouts from John of, "Not like that Kevin!", with Nehemiah gently encouraging me to "go ahead". Apparently I never fully grasped how deep you have to cut the throat. Poor Julius...

It was then on to the less glamorous tasks of skinning and butchering, which I duly bodyswerved:


before we set it all on the fire with muscles still twitching...it smelled, and tasted, amazing (goat meat has grown on me during my time here):


Almost immediately after we'd killed the goat, the cry went out from across the compound of "Snake! Snake!" and so I sprang into action, running in the direction of the call with nothing to kill it with at all. Fortunately, I was handed a machete and I was able to kill it...eventually. After I broke it's back first (making it the second animal in quick sucession to suffer a painful death at my hands)


The above photo shows me about to strike, but I'm guessing you cant even see the snake. I cant and I know where it is...unfortunately it was pretty small. But here is the evidence, which I'm sure you were all craving, of my latest snake kill. Number 4 so far. My target is 10...


And that's it for today I think. Life progresses as normal, I'm growing more and more to love the Sudanese coffee culture. This morning I went to bring some tools to some of the guys here who were going to do some work for us and when I arrived they said "Have you had coffee yet?", before inviting me to join them...I'm hoping to introduce this custom when I return to work in October. Nothing gets done until we all have a coffee.

The eagerly awaited pictures of the building are on their way. They have been taken but are still on someone elses camera. Like I said, I wont let you down...