This.Beautiful.Chaos

The thought that any nationality could beat the South African with the amount of meat he consumes was not one I readily conceptualised until I spent a sweltering Sunday afternoon with thirty-odd Brazilians.
It is Easter Sunday, and I am sitting on the sidewalk of a dirty yellow street in Conjuta Ceará, a quaint but bustling low-cost settlement on the outskirts of Ceará’s capital city. Amongst plastic chairs and tables, shiny warm-skinned people and the buzz of Portuguese laughter, my language limitations reduce me to a nervous observer of the flies that patiently waft around the plates and furniture and faces destined soon to be smeared with flavour.
The smell of churrasco, a South American-style barbeque, consumes the air, and it is not long before it mingles with the humidity resting on the skin of every family member to whom I had recently and enthusiastically been acquainted. A series of spitting steaks are slapped onto the plate in front of me, and before I can blink the steam from my eyes there is a clamour of knives, forks, hands and skewers lunging for the first of what would be a persistent six-hour delivery of morsels from the sizzling flame.
Cheap Brazilian funk blasts through the improvised speakers, adding to the heat of festivities. One-litre bottles of cold Skol beer are placed on the row of tables to counteract this, and are eagerly grabbed by large male hands, leaving the bottles with fatty finger imprints naturally avoided by gliding droplets of condensation. The atmosphere gets louder as the meat gets hotter, stomachs are gratified, and the simplistically happy atmosphere draws from within me a deep sense of belonging and content that etches a smile to my face. The relaxed temperament grows, and as segments of carne, fat, beer and Coca-Cola are carelessly splattered on the tables and occasional shirt of merrymaking participants, it is accompanied relentlessly by the hastened fidgeting of flies nobody seems to notice.
It came to be that the diligent attempt I had made to sacrifice meat for the forty days of Lent was retributively made up for in one sitting. For despite my cynicism regarding the origin of the donkey-sized mass of meat so avidly cooked and distributed to snatching hands that day, I promptly decided that it be best not to ask any questions. My conscience and I would have had to settle for the trusty accompaniment of rice and beans had I not wiped caution from my dampened brow and flicked it to the dusty street.