Thanksgiving just passed for us here in the states and I have to say it is my favorite holiday, as my midsection can attest.
For our African friends, Thanksgiving is a day we all (hopefully) gather with loved ones, overeat, watch football and then sleep off the turkey blues until early Black Friday when we push and shove our way through crowds of shoppers for 50 percent off a flat screen TV. Somewhere in all of that we’re supposed to be giving thanks for the blessings in our lives, although I think some of us could stand to be a little less blessed and a lot more thankful.
What I love about Thanksgiving is the getting together. By nature, I’m not overly social, but once a year getting together with people is about what I can tolerate and is partly why each year for the past five I’ve organized (with the indispensable help of my mother, Meloy) a big cookout, usually in October, for family and friends.
The first year we fed a dozen people, the next 22, the next 30, and for the last two years we’ve fed over 50 people each year and had a great get-together in the process.
The culinary focus of these cookouts – for several reasons – has always been wild game meat.
Firstly, I have a lot of wild game meat that mom and I can’t eat fast enough.
Secondly, many people have never tried game meat and frequently ask about the taste of different species. But mostly it helps me remember where that meat came from and I am thankful for the blessing of being able to hunt and fish and do the things I enjoy, communing with God and nature.
Each year we do this cookout it reminds me of Africa and how much I love that country and hunting there. Why? Because everything I hunt in Africa feeds hungry people in a country so marked by poverty that I think every American should visit it and get a wake-up call to be thankful for what they have.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife does not allow the import of game meat from Africa to the U.S. so anything you hunt there, stays there (meat wise). And that’s a good thing, because hunger is a very real problem even in the modern cities, but it is starkly worse in the rural areas.
The first time I hunted Africa in 2019, the outfitter we went with took the meat from our trophies and processed it and sold it in a local grocery store as a much-reduced and affordable meat for the poorer residents.
In 2021, our outfitter donated the meat that was not used to feed the lodge staff to a local school.
We were supposed to take meat to the school one day and meet the children, but an unhappy vehicle accident by a member of the outfitter’s family caused us to miss that delivery.
In 2023, our outfitter donated the meat to a local orphanage, a senior center and a soup kitchen. As of our visit, the outfitter had given more than 30,000 pounds of meat that year to feeding the needy.
Each year at Thanksgiving I’m reminded of my most humbling moment in Africa.
It was in 2019 and we had been hunting plains zebra most of a morning. Zebra is both skittish and wile and if you get a shot on them, it is seldom not on the fly.
Fortunately, I was finally able to connect with a big mare and she ran into the thickest, snaggiest patch of thorn bushes the Almighty ever created. The thorn brush was so thick that when the mare finally gave up the ghost and fell, the brush was still holding her upright.
She never actually fell completely to the ground.
She was nearly 200 yards from the closest track we could navigate with our Land Rover and finally the guide called up the ranch headquarters asking for them to bring a bulldozer to push us a path in to retrieve her.
After an hour’s wait, a single cab, Tacoma-sized Toyota pickup finally pulled up and 18 native workers climbed out of it. A sight such as that you could hardly believe.
The dozer was broken and these 18 men were going to do the job instead.
They took a game retrieval sled (a Kevlar tarp with fixed handles attached) into the brush and stomped, heaved and strained to drag her to the road.
Those men came out cut to pieces, clothes ripped; one man lost the entire sole of his worn-out boot and was barefooted.
I turned to my guide in shame. I had left my wallet at the lodge (no need for it while hunting) and had no way to tip these brave men.
“We will take care of it,” he said.
After the zebra was loaded into the truck, the guide handed me the drink cooler and turned to the men, “Who would like a soda,” he asked.
Ladies and gentlemen, it breaks my heart to this day (tears in my eyes as I write this) to remember the look of excitement on their faces and hear the joy in their voices as they crowded around me excitedly jabbering; “Coke. Sprite. Fanta.”
Each had his drink of choice and they took them with cupped hands of supplication, bowing and through their radiant smiles saying, “Thank you, sir. Thank you.”
I guarantee I could not hand any one of you reading this $1 million and get such a genuine and heartfelt “thank you” or see such a soul-crushing look of gratitude as those 18 men gave me that day.
As they sat around savoring their sodas, laughing and smiling, I was even more ashamed I could not do more for them.
To see them as they arrived that day — packed 18 deep in a truck barely large enough for half, the look of beaten down submission to a life seldom more than backbreaking struggle for simply something to eat weighing heavy on their brows — and then to see them come alive — for a moment remembering they are men, human men, and enjoying a pleasure so simple we who live in a land of plenty can’t even conceive of it — truly makes me humbled.
