its chicken tonight

This is my favorite story of the week. Maybe you had to be there, but I was, so it makes me laugh every time…

I went into town to buy something for the garden but since it was exactly 1:30 when I got there, the store was closed because the man was praying. Figuring he would be back within 15 or 20 minutes, I decided to stick around and wait. I had worked at the hospital all morning and had nothing to do the rest of the day. It was hot, very hot, so a man selling gas across the street flagged me over to sit in the shade. I sat and spoke to him for a while, watching the action on bustling main road. There was the usual motos, women selling things on their heads, children rolling sticks with tires (the equivalent of dribbling a basketball around?), and of course, endless streams of goats and chickens.

After about 30 minutes and still no sign of the shop owner, a moto came screaming down the road. There was a chicken in the road just in front of me, and when he heard the oncoming moto, he tried to run, but went the wrong way-right into the path of the speeding moto. It happened so fast, but if I had to be called as a witness, I’d say he was struck by the front tire and some part of him, maybe his head, was run over by the rear tire. I thought for sure the thing would be dead, but true to the cliché, he jumped up and ran in a wide circle in the middle of the street-like a chicken with his head cut off.

He made it back to the spot of the accident and continued on to the porch of a building across the street. In a dramatic puff of feathers, he let out one last squawk, flipped onto his back and died with his feet straight up in the air. Before I had time to laugh, a little boy ran over and grabbed him by the claws and ran into the house with the evening’s freshly dead main course. (What little I know about killing and eating animals leads me to believe that you can’t let an animal be dead long before readying it for the pot.)

That part of the story is funny enough to think about, but the best is yet to come. As I was trying to formulate something witty to say in french, I heard a commotion from the place where the boy and the chicken disappeared. Out came the same little boy, running and crying, and behind him, came his mother wielding a shoe, ready to strike (again?).

I have no idea what the kid did wrong. Maybe he was in charge of watching the chicken, maybe it was something completely different. But this whole episode which lasted no more than 4 minutes, made my hour wait worth it. Even if the store owner never did show up and I went home empty handed…