Circle of Life: The Untold Story

The pig hit the ground, stunned, and the red dust rose around it. The heads on the old bus swiveled in unison out the dusty back window. Stiff from arching my shoulders forward without the room to straighten them and my knees mashed into the wall of the bus, I struggled to turn enough for a clean view. It took a few moments to register as the driver rushed out into the red dirt road and crept up behind the pig, which sat dumbfounded and wide eyed on its haunches in a swirl of diesel exhaust and dust. At first I thought it had been in the road and we hit it. This curdled my throat. But then, I realized as the entire bus erupted into laughter and pigeon English, that it had been tied to the top of the bus with the luggage and the plantain bunches as cargo and had come crashing off as we sped around a turn.

Blood ran down its pink nose and it made no effort to escape as the driver approached but instead eyed us dolefully from afar. The roof was a good twenty feet high and we’d been thrashing around that dusty turn. The young pig made a good effort to casually gander off but it didn’t look to have the strength to run. The driver dove for its hind leg and carried it back to the bus, dangling its bloodied body from one leg while it squealing pitifully. It was then tossed up to the roof and lashed to it once again with a strap. The bus roared as the driver put us into gear and the sun hit on its hottest midday high note.

Its not often that those of us from the first world think about the source of things. The source of our water, our power, our food, our clothes. And all that is by design of course, because if we appreciated the source of things we use, we probably wouldn’t use or buy as much of it. I myself am a first class second-hand consumer. All I care about is what I get when I buy something that has reached the shelf but thinking any farther back into its history than that just irritates my conscience. I’ve been lucky to visit this continent because that, I can promise you, will change for me in the future. Maybe not so much the reality of my consumption habits as my thoughtfulness for what I consume and who made it. After all, sometimes it’s the thought that counts.

In Africa we have seen all kinds of interesting things that tend to stay out of sight in our own country, only one of which is the live animals grazing just nearby that end up on our dinner plates. If you want chicken or goat meat, you have to buy one from a local farm. You have to see it alive, kill it yourself, clean it and cook it over an open fire. If you want vegetables, you buy them from a local who grew it behind their house. What you eat is therefore much limited to what is growing or living nearby at the moment and so you don’t complain much for lack of variety. When it rains very little or very much, the power shuts off, most of which comes from fragile hydroelectric sources. When there is no money to build an efficient water infrastructure (or even when there is), you’ll be trekking with yellow jugs to the local spring to hand-carry everything from bath to cooking to drinking water. Kids as young as five can be seen with a jug in each hand bigger than they are on their way back from the spring each morning. And if you are unlucky like our current town, then things like cholera epidemics are a dark reminder of the source - or lack thereof - of everyday things. When there are no mystery trucks that come by like the tooth fairy in the early morning to collect your trash, you simply pile it in your yard and burn it. Sure burning plastic is a carcinogen but it will kill you a lot slower than unsanitary diseases living in rotting garbage outside your house. However inconvenient these things are when they are visible, they are also very real. The real causes and effects of human life, just like the life of anything else on earth.

In general, its difficult to see how most Africans treat animals. In fact, most of the time its downright disturbing. Barefoot children throwing rocks at their dogs for enjoyment while adults lead the way by kicking and beating their dogs until they become both skiddish and mean. I cried once at the deaf school for young children watching them mistreat their dog, who endured the kicks and punches like a silent martyr before following behind them obediently back up to the schoolhouse. I welled up and smacked the hands of the children who had hit the dog, but they looked up at me confused and hurt as to why this strange white person would be angry at them for doing what their teachers do every day. Dogs are things not people, right? And pigs are only food. The irony was sad and painful from a group of kids who are forgotten and stepped upon themselves by their own communities because they cant hear. Every day in Uganda we had the pleasure of hearing a pig get killed next door, the sound of which will haunt my every nightmare until the day I die--and here they do it much more humanely then they do it in secret at home. A dozen live chickens tied together at the neck hung upside down and carried on the back of a motorcycle on a bumpy highway. Cardboard crates of small yellow chicks stacked on top of one another on the ferry to Zanzibar with their tiny beaks bleating pathetically all at once. Goats tied to a foot of rope cowering under a banana leaf in desperation for shade from the midday African sun. These are things, and much worse, that I know for a fact happen in our own country. And it seems to me that the only way we Americans can afford to differentiate the treatment of our pets from the treatment of the animals we eat is by not having to see it before it ends up on our plate as a rack of lamb. But seeing it as a part of everyday life, seeing it as a source and a real live being, is a little harder to ignore. At least for me. And in that way maybe Africans are doing it right - earning the right to eat what they kill. At least they are consistent. The moral quagmire of it all can be hard for we westerners. And while the rest of that bus was laughing at the everyday comical nature of a pig falling off the roof, something in that pig’s eyes got right up in my throat and choked me. Because in my opinion, everything living deserves a little dignity. Even if it has to die.

I don’t see myself as an activist, a tree hugger (well, maybe), or a weirdo and Im certainly not about to throw red paint on someone coming out of Bergdorf’s. I don’t think that everyone should be a vegetarian, buy only used clothes or stop living life the way we want to, because the first thing you learn in Africa is that people gotta live and the circle of life is more than just a great Disney anthem to this great continent. But I do think that a little more respect is due from all of us here at the top of the food chain, the economic chain and the overall state-of-the-world chain. Even if its just a moment at the grocery counter, a moment over a bite of food, or a moment in the seat of our car to think about who it was that cut, cleaned, packaged and shipped it to our doorstep for us. To think about the massive global spider web hanging from the walls of our world stringing us all along together. Every small vibration is absorbed by its invisible fibers but still, on some level, it is felt by all.