Not for the faint of heart… or stomach

Mothers day came a week later in Paraguay than it did in the United States, so I spent this past weekend spending some good quality time with my host family. In addition to the 4 kids that live here, 4 of the other 5 children came to bid their mom happy mother’s day, so needless to say, there was a houseful. One of my host brothers had been joking with me the last couple days that he was going to have me help kill the pig for this special occasion. I told him yes while shaking my head no. While I can enjoy a good BBQ’ed fresh pig, I didn’t think I would have the courage to actually take the butcher knife and stab the pig in the heart which was exactly what my brother did while another brother was holding it down. I think it’s safe to say that was the goriest thing I have seen in my life and the whole time all I could think of was the movie “Babe” and couldn’t help but feel sorry for the pig while covering my mouth with my hand as my eyes widened which made my brothers laugh at me. I spent a good couple of hours watching my brothers de-hair (they used kitchen spoons by the way), skin, and cut up the pig. After it was fully slaughtered and parts separated (and I won’t go into detail, but yes I saw all of the insides), they threw it on a BBQ (aka sheet of metal on the ground held down my bricks, burning coals, and a raised square metal object that vaguely resembled a BBQ). A couple hours later, we ate said pig and I will say it was quite delicious.
When they had removed the intestines I had thought they brought them into the house but hadn’t done further investigation into the uses of pig intestines because I really didn’t want to know. That night my mom asked me if I was hungry for dinner and guess what was on my plate when I sat down? Yep, I sat down to dinner with my mom and dad with a plate full of pig guts. “It’s a specialty here,” my dad said, “don’t worry, it won’t do anything to you” (he likes to say this when I say I’m not hungry. I think he thinks I’m worried about getting fat, so he tells me that things like potatoes and fatty meat won’t make me gain weight. I’m not sure thought what he thinks would make me gain weight since he says that about pretty much everything.) I grabbed a big piece of sopa (Paraguayan corn bread) and cut off a little piece of meat. Unlike the meat I’d eaten earlier, this part of the pig is not so yummy and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the picture out of my head of my mom removing the intestines from the pig earlier that day which made it all that much harder to eat. Somehow between large bites of sopa and carefully picking out all the green peppers on my plate, I got through one small piece and felt like I had been sitting down for long enough to excuse myself. I sat there for another minute to let my dad finish whatever he was talking about and as I was spacing out, I looked up and lo and behold, there was the pigs head hanging on a beam right by the kitchen table, gore and all. It was all I could do not to let my jaw drop to the floor at the site and I wasn’t really sure whether I wanted to laugh, be disgusted, or just be straight up confused. When I later asked my brothers why the pigs head was in the house, they seemed confused by my question and they just said, “we eat it.” So the next day I was again treated to unidentifiable pieces of pig meat. Seeing that I wasn’t exactly scarfing down my food, my brother asked me which part of the pig I liked and as I looked down at my plate, the only thing I could think of was, “the part that doesn’t still have hair on it.” He thought this was pretty funny and agreed that he wasn’t too keen on pig guts or skin either. While he started searching for actual pieces of meat for me but I found that I’d already lost my appetite. I feel like there’s supposed to be a moral of the story, or a lesson learned type of thing, but that’s really all I’ve got. I watched my brother kill a pig and I ate unidentifiable pig parts. End of story.