Day # 19. Update and beef...

Watching the work during a school break.

Will start with the update so that those of you who don't hunt or eat meat can stop reading before the second part of this blog.

As of Sunday, Haiti's numbers were being reported by the health department as follows:
24 cases [20 imported, 4 community. 1 death [a 55 year old man with health issues]
63 hospitalized quarantine. 613 residential quarantine. 24 in isolation. All stable.

Some new rules like only 8 people per tap tap [public transportation trucks] with 4 per bench. One passenger on motorcycles.

Wash stations, limited groups, limited markets, masks......

Délice continues to wait for rain. Cory and the guys watered well yesterday and then continued the work on the stairs outback.

Some character building lessons, some mask sewing, and a bit of school for me yesterday.

Animal lovers, non-meat eaters may want to stop reading here.

Beef.

Ribs!

So Saturday night we received word of a cow having fallen down a ravine.

She was injured enough to be put down, so they were taking orders for meat before putting her down Sunday morning.

So we enjoyed a quiet morning with family worship knowing that the afternoon would be busy.

We purchased a front quarter knowing that we could both use the meat, and help to bless the family by helping them recover some of the financial loss of the cow.

Part of the front leg.

She was 4 or 5 years old and  did have a calf but it is old enough to get by without it's mom.

Butchering in Haiti is done with a machete, on the ground.

We didn't want the hoof or lower leg.

So processing the meat starts with picking off leaves, rocks, twigs and a good washing.

Then cutting up the pieces into manageable sizes for freezing.

Thankful for a Christmas present from my folks years ago of a Cabela knife set.

Soon we had 3 pots of bones stewing on the stove.

After cooling we froze the broth, cleaned the remaining good meat off the bones.

This beef is so lean that there wasn't any fat on the broth from boiling the ribs and other bones for many hours.

Thankfully Cory was able to look once again to our small spare freezer/refrigerator in the basement that hasn't worked for a while and got it running again by using it's 12/24V DC cord hooked up to our 24V battery bank instead of AC.

Because one can't just wait to process raw meat we worked through Sunday afternoon.


It took Cory and I over four hours to process the 35-40 pounds of meat.

Then we were able to join our Haiti teammates [from Haiti, and USA locations] for church over the phone.

We also took Monday afternoon off from school and completed our day of rest for the week.

Mostly chicken and beef in our regular freezer now

With a food processor we were donated years ago we are also able to grind up some of the meat.

We are thankful for this provision as we do not know when we will be able to shop again.

So for those worried we don't have anything to eat..we're good.