(this story is not for the squeamish)

I ran the volunteer projects in Mexico for a non profit called Amigos de las Escuelas for a number of years, and guided volunteers to build one room plywood classrooms, or put chain link fencing around a kindergarten, build cement block walls, and we even built a community center during those years. During that time, I befriended a local man, who always came out for the twice a year projects, and worked with us on whatever we were doing. His name was Chava. He and I became good friends, and I was treated like a member of the family when I was at his house.

One year he invited me to drive about 8 hours deep into Mexico, to the tiny ejido of Nuevo Tantuan, where his mom lived, (and he grew up), to visit her, and to celebrate his youngest sister Adrianna’s graduation from secondary school, the first of the kids in that family to have gone that far in school. It was the biggest family I ever knew. Chava was the oldest child, and was 40. Then there were 11 brothers and sisters until you got down to the youngest, Adriana, who was just 14.

I had regaled Chava with stories of Africa during the projects for Amigos de las Escuelas, and on the 8 hour drive down to his moms house. His favorite story was of a Boy Scout camporee that I had gone to while in Swaziland, where a man used the traditional Swazi method of killing a cow, so we could feed the 400 boy scouts at the soiree. He was fascinated by the story, so when we got to Nuevo Tantuan, he told me that he would show me the traditional Mexican method of killing a pig, from which they would make chicharones and tamales for the celebration of Adrianas graduation the next day. I would need to get up at 3:30 in the morning, to see it.

At 3:30 my alarm went off, so I got up from where I had been sleeping, in the bed of my pickup truck, and got a cup of coffee from Dona Petra, and wandered into the backyard behind the house where the pig was tied. Chava had not gotten back there yet, and I looked at the sleepy pig, eating corn cobs. It was the skinniest pig I had ever seen. Probably from having to eat corn cobs with no corn on them. It was quiet in the ejido, a small group of houses of local agricultural workers, maybe 250 people.

Chava came around the corner of the house with his machete, sharpening it with a file as he walked. The moment the pig saw him, it knew it’s time had come, and it started squealing at the top of its lungs, so loudly that there was no way that anyone in the ejido could still be sleeping, and running to the limit of the rope that tied it there. Chava approached the pig, and grabbed it by the ear, and mounted it like a cowboy. If the pig was squealing before, it was now in full panic mode, and hollering so loudly that I thought it would make me deaf, and jumping around with Chava riding it like a bucking bronco. Chava slipped the machete under the pigs neck, and cut its head off in mid squeal, and plop, onto the ground it fell, with a geyser of blood. That wasn’t what I was expecting, but it got the job done. Then we laid the pig on its back, and cut the skin open and butchered it. So, normally when you butcher a pig, you carve off the thick layer of fat under the skin, and toss it in a big pot, to be melted and used to fry the chicharones, which are just strips of the pig skin. There was almost no fat on this pig, that is how skinny it was. We rendered the meat, and Dona Petra took it into the kitchen to start preparation for the tamales. Lots of family were coming today, and she needed the whole pig to make enough tamales to feed them.

Later, when it came time to cook the chicharones, I had to go to the store down the road and buy 2 gallons of cooking oil, so that there was enough grease for frying. A skinny pig. Maybe the skinniest in Mexico.

Graduation Matters