Preparing food in Benin

Let me just start saying that my meal last night was the best meal that I have eaten since I have been in Benin and I was apart of creating it. The meal consisted of grilled eggplant, a sheep, couscous and a tabouleh. The girls made the couscous and made the tabouleh, while me and a few of the other guys went to work on making the sheep/mutton. We went to the market and bought a dog-size sheep for 12,000 F CFA (about $25). One of the guys brought it back to the workstation strapped across his lap on a motorcycle, while the rest of us walked about 20 minutes back. This is where the fun began...It was time to kill, clean, and cook the mutton. One problem with this....we are a bunch of city dwelling, whities that have idea what it takes or how to kill or clean an animal, let alone a decent sized sheep. Solution...talk to the Beninese guard who has grown up without K-Mart, Walmart, grocery stores with prepared foods, i.e. he grew up in Africa. So he took the sheep outside, dug a whole with a knife, and saw at the neck, cutting everything in the throat up until the spine and let it bleed itself out, but of course, before we did this, we needed to make it kosher, so me and the only other Jewish guy here decided to bless the sheep and properly slaughter the animal, just for kicks.
To de-skin a sheep, the guard, named Pedro, tied off the open neck with a bit of rubber. Then he cut a little whole under the skin, but did not puncture the meat underneath. He then proceeded to literally blow into this whole, creating (as we dubbed) a sheep-aloon. Possibly one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen, just imagine a sheep blown up, legs sprawled cause it was full of too much air, its impossible until you see it yourself (by the way). Pedro then went about cleaning the sheep, peeling the skin, gutting the animal and preparing it to be cooked. (By the way, a headless sheep, without any fur, if propped up in a lying position but with its head up (without a head) looks exactly like a full grown dog, kinda creepy, but helps you imagine the sight.
We grilled the sheep’s meat, liver, kidneys and the best part of the animal for all, its testicles. Because none of us had ever eaten animal testis before, of course it all had to be at once, all 14 of us. On three we all ate the white mass, half squinting, just expecting the taste/sensation/texture/idea of it to make all of us to gag us, but the moment was answered by nothing but silence. Finally broken by one of us turning to another and mumbling, “Dude, I just ate balls.” The weird thing about sheep testis is the fact that they tasted like a bland hard-boiled egg; the exact same texture, consistency, and flavor. After 4 hours of smoking the meat, I bit into the greatest, juiciest, smoked piece of meat I have eaten in about a year. This entire episode will be repeated in a week, but most likely with either a pig, chicken, goat or yet another sheep, we shall see. It is planned that at our next conference for all/most volunteers we are going to buy a cow. I can’t wait!