Woodchipper Goat

This Christmas, Sean and I adopted a refugee family, through the IRC. They are from Bhutan but had been living in a refugee camp in Nepal for many years, before arriving in the U.S. in April 2009. We received a 'wish list' from them, and went and picked out a few gifts for each family member. It was fun to buy things for people who actually need them, even though it added more stuff to our to-do list. (Which is already kind of full with the wedding coming up in less than a month!)

Friday after work we drove down to the family's apartment and dropped off the gifts. We sat down to chat with them for awhile (their two high-school-age sons speak pretty good English), and they offered us some tea. It tasted kind of like chai tea but super sweet (I'm guessing it was made with condensed milk). I was thinking, this is cool we get to have some authentic Bhutanese tea and talk to this nice, adorable family. The boys told us that they felt like the whole thing was a dream and they still couldn't believe that they were in America.

Well then it got a whole lot more authentic. Their mom brought us out some bowls of goat meat. Sean now calls it woodchipper goat, because it was essentially pieces of a goat that had just been passed through a woodchipper. Bones, tendons, etc. No fur though, thankfully.

I know, I'm a spoiled American. I claim to love experiencing new cultures and trying new foods, but when it comes to meat I am a giant wuss. I rarely eat meat, other than the occasional cheeseburger, because I hate gristle and fat. The worst part was that I knew Sean was silently laughing so hard at me. He knew that I was trying to be nice and polite and eat this meat, but that I was exerting all of my effort to force it down.

Then it gets even funnier. Despite my best efforts, I only got through about half of that meat (Ok maybe like 40%.) The mom took our bowls away and I felt bad for not finishing it but at the same time I was thinking Ok crisis over. We sat and watched a DVD of Bollywood movie excerpts with the boys while they told us all about the plots of their favorite movies. After about an hour and a half of this, we started getting up to leave, but one of the sons asked us to stay for dinner. We just looked at each other like how can we say no to that? and sat back down.

At first they just put two plates on the table for us, but we convinced one of the sons to eat with us. I don't know if that was rude or not, but I just felt so weird eating while everyone else isn't eating. Our meal was rice, bean soup, and more goat. Despite my misgivings about the goat, I must say that the spices on all of their food (including the goat) were very delicious. The way Sean described the situation later was: "Amy, they thought you didn't finish the goat because it got cold, so they reheated it to give you another chance to eat it!" By the way, he says this between mirthful peals of laughter because he thought I was getting my just desserts. However, he technically didn't eat the goat correctly either - we learned from watching the son that we were supposed to be eating the bones in addition the the meat & meat-ish stuff.

Anyway, I had the last laugh, as our nice dinner did come with dessert - a cup of yogurt. Sean doesn't really like yogurt, and he especially doesn't like watery yogurt with curdled chunks in it. I also didn't love the chunks, but I basically have no problem with yogurt so I ate mine and laughed silently while Sean choked down about half of his. Mmwwuaa ha ha.