Shopping for chicken

. 
We rolled up to our destination in the hippest, well cheapest ride around. I argued with the Rickshaw Wallah that I wouldn’t pay him more than we agreed, and after I had enough arguing I just walked away and let him complain to the passerby’s he had pulled into the dispute.
 We approached the cages. Stacks of them filled with chickens. They lined the walkway up to the man in charge of this operation, a 14 year old boy. I said “Muje eik”. He picked one out and weighed it and spout off some number I didn’t know in the form of a question. “Ji” I replied, not knowing what he said, but by the looks of the chicken it would fit in my biggest pot.
 Then Arwyn, Malachi and I proceeded to watch the process. He pinned back the chickens wings and head and slit the neck so quickly. Then he pushed him in a box and closed the lid. We heard lots of thumping around for a few minutes then the dead chicken was removed, bloody and well, dead.
 He cut off the feet and head and  
started to pull the whole skin and feathers right off. So from that I gathered that the box was a steaming process. The chicken was still twitching when he asked me if I wanted it into “char” pieces. I said yes, the less I had to do to the chicken the better. He cut it open and the heart was still beating. I was too busy snapping pictures to see what the kids looked liked watching all of this. 

 Soon we had our chicken bagged and we were back on our rickshaw towards home. In bed that night Malachi didn’t want to wear his red shirt because it looked like blood.  

The next day I had them draw about this in there observation journals. Arwyns elaborate drawing had scenes. The front page was the boy and chickin coming out of the cage. The back was drawn all in the red crayon. Pretty self explanatory. One interesting fact was that on the front page the chicken had a voice and on the back the chicken voice marks were gone.