What's For Dinner?

Soup. That's what I had for dinner tonight. Not that big of a deal, right? Well, a good question would be "what kind of soup was it?" It was basically broth and beef. However, "beef" doesn't do it justice. I had already had a few bites of broth and a couple bites of meat that my host brother had separated and plopped in the bowl in front of me. Time out…

Just a reminder of the way Senegalese eat… out of one big dish. So this means that when you eat soup, you're eating out of a big bowl of soup together. When eating rice or something out of the same dish, it's easy to stay in your corner and not share too many "germs." However, when eating soup, your section of the soup doesn't exactly stay isolated from the soup in front of the others eating out of the exact same bowl. Ok, time in...

So, we've been eating for a little over a minute. I'd had a lot of broth, and a few bites of beef. My host mother/sister starts chewing on the meat from a bone that she has picked out of the broth. My host brother comments on how much my host mother/sister likes beef. I look closer, and she has just picked dry a jaw bone. Yep, that's right. I give the dish a better look, and yep, floating in the soup is a jaw bone with teeth intact. Yummy. Looking closer I clearly saw a skull that was being broken apart in the bowl. It's a good thing I'd been in Senegal awhile and I guess worked up to this… because if they had tried to feed this to me back in September I don't know how I would've handled it. But, I kept eating. Towards the end of the meal my stomach finally started to realize what it had been consuming. So, I stopped eating and removed myself from the porch. Now, a few hours later, I of course feel fine and not sick. But man, that really tested me.

It has been confirmed… it was sheep head soup. So the skull of the sheep was floating around in the soup. Mmm, yummy.