Chompipe

Chompipe (pronounced chom-pee-pay) is one of my favorite words in Spanish. I like the way it sounds. It means "turkey" and I had my first close encounter with one yesterday. My sitemate Jennifer has one more year to go here in Nicaragua, as does the rest of her group (duh). So they'll be celebrating Thanksgiving here and one of Jen's friends decided she wanted to buy, fatten, kill, and eat a chompipe.

While I am a vegetarian, I have no problem with animals being killed as long as they are treated well and arne't injected with a bajillion hormones and antibiotics.

Anyways, this friend of Jen's lives FOUR HOURS away from where we live. And yet, she decided it would be a preferrable idea to buy the chompipe in our town and take it on the bus to where she lives. I thought this was a horrible idea, but that is in fact what she decided to do. So yesterday the chompipe was delivered to our house (by a very abliging profesora who picked it up from the farm on her way home from school). It was transported in a bag with holes in it. Maybe not the most humane thing, but really...what were the other options?

It spent the night at our house and today went on the journey to its new home. I heard he's doing fine and protested very little when he and his bag were tied to the top of the bus.

The wind must have been a nice change from the blistering heat of the inside of the bus.