Aluta Continua! Aluta Continua! 'Til the Chicken Come Home to Roost

I recently heard a sad but funny story. It is sad because it’s based on poverty and funny by the way the narrator was telling it. It was the story of a family so poor that the mother works at a poultry farm. This is how it was told to me;

“The other day she quit working there because the other women who work as domestics also wanted to work at the poultry. And when we asked her why didn’t she want to work in the house given that it’s warm, cozy and the food is galore she said that she’s tired of competing for dead chicken with them. Apparently she loved working in the poultry farm because even though everyone earned R300 a month wherever they were working, at the farm she also had her way with dead chicken. On an average morning you would have eight dead chicken and sometimes thirteen and she took them all home and plucked them, then cooked them.

“So the other day we were surprised because even though that family is known for poverty we noticed that the children always chowed half-chicken each with their dinner. You would find a child struggling with half-chicken and I was like, ‘for the life of me at home we are not that poor but we eat chicken potions, not half chicken each. That’s when I realized that it is the dead chicken. There are four children and whenever the mother comes back from work she just plucks three birds, and serves each half chicken with pap”

That was sad, I thought and funny they way the two chaps went ahead and shared the story, “so we haven’t been eating chicken for some time because everytime I look at my chicken I’m thinking about the decomposing one I saw being relished”.

I shared their frustration. I remembered that I have been to a mortuary only once, and on that day that I walked in and out of that doomed house I had difficulty eating anything with gravy or flesh. And for me it was clear that no-one can serve anyone human flesh but it still gave me creeps. And for my two buddies I felt apathy, and for the family eating dead chicken I felt that those who have something little must share with those who have nothing. We need a caring society that makes sure that nobody endangers their lives (eating dead chicken) under our guard. Aluta Continua!