Eid al-Adhan --> watch yourself if you hate blood

Head set aside as the rest of the body was dismembered
disemboweled

SOME BLOODY PICS. BEWARE

Ohh salam alakum

Sorry it's been a while again. These last couple weeks have been fairly busy - mostly with traveling, etc. And I'm kinda sleepy and also working on this damn ISP (independent study project... love my topic. But dear lord it's a lot to write) but I figured I'd stop being lazy about the blogging thing and end the terrible suspense of the last post and fill you in on Eid al-Adhan! Ahh I'll start with some pictures of the big day (and because I'm not entirely sure who's reading this blog and because I don't know your gore/blood-tolerance level, I'm going to keep the pictures I post relatively tame. But if you hate the sight of blood, don't look at these pics. **Just to warn you.**)

Sorry if this grosses you out. I just felt like
I shouldn't deprive you of the scene I got to
witness

Skin --> off

Disemboweling 

                  

The end

Alright. So. Those pictures tell you a lot about how we started our day. Again, if you don't care to hear about the details of the event, skip down a few paragraphs. Woke up, had a little breakfast, watched the king on TV as he sat through the imam speaking at the mosque, saw him kill 2 sheep on TV. The atmosphere in the house felt somewhat like it does on Christmas - everyone's just kind of lounging around, ready to relax for the day. Then without any warning, the ram is on the 2nd floor with us, as are an imam and 2 men that clearly do the killing and later butchering. They wrestle the ram down to the ground and cut it's throat very quickly - tons and tons of intensely bright red blood poured out, but the ram was dead relatively quickly. It kind of scared me a little later though, because like a chicken running after his head's been cut off, the ram kicked out and went crazy after his throat had been slit. Gaah. The imam left shortly after, and we were left to watch the dismemberment of the body of the ram. That part was a lot easier to watch, oddly (esp with the skin off, you kind of distance yourself from the idea that that body was just a few minutes ago a living, breathing animal and it becomes just meat someone is butchering) and I've included some pictures from that. The final picture is what the body finally looked like, once all the organs were taken out. I'm really surprised I made it through this whole thing without either throwing up or passing out, but for some reason the setting of it and how quickly it all happened made it somehow tolerable. Can't really explain it, but maybe I was partially just shocked by it all too.

We then waited while my friend's host fam prepared lunch. This was a meal of liver skewered on sticks with a slice of fat wrapped around it grilled over some coal. The taste was pretty good, but I'm not a huge fan of the texture of it all. Oo boy. For dinner later, we had organ and chick pea stew! Mmm, tasty? Apparently, the first day you eat the organs and you wait for the next day to eat the actual meaty part of the sheep. So that was that. I'm glad I tried it but I don't think I'm going to be ordering it in a restaurant anytime soon. 

Anywho, as crazy as the actual slaughtering was, we had an experience outside the house that I thought was just as interesting. The aftermath of Aid... da da daaa. My friend and I walked down to the end of her street, which met up with the main road, and immediately in front of us was this chaotic smokey scene of destruction. Maybe a little melodramatic, but really. This was intense. There were these huge fire pits set up for roasting the heads of the sheep - but not just roasting. Blackening to a crisp. The guys out on the streets (between the ages of about 13-28 maybe) would then grab the heads out of the fire (some bare-handed! gah. Only the older ones though) and proceed to chop the horns off the head and then split the head in half. Next to these massive fire pits were piles of these skins turned inside-out, all waiting to be picked up for cleaning and drying. All along the street too, people were trying to keep these huge fires going, so were throwing in old doors, chairs, crates, whatever would be fire friendly and was currently unused. You can imagine all the sounds I got to hear that day! What with all the sheep killings, the blood, the heaps of sheep's skins, the blackened heads emerging from these fire mounds, the kids throwing chairs and doors into these fires, the gray sky and the smokey air, it seriously looked like some apocalyptic, end of the world scene from a movie. So. Intense. It felt like being part of some sort of exclusive club though, being out on the streets with all this happening and witnessing it. Sometimes it pays to be American - though I'm a girl, since I'm foreign I didn't get shuma-ed off the streets. Hurray.

So, needless to say, Eid was intense. If you didn't read about it from the last post, it's basically reenacting the biblical story of Abraham. He was instructed to sacrifice his son, but at the last minute there was divine intervention and instead Abraham was told to sacrifice a sheep in the place of his son. Hence killing the sheep. Crazy how many people go all out with getting one sheep (or more... depending on econ status) - of the 4-5 million sheep that are killed in Morocco each year for food, 1 million are killed on Eid al-Adhan. This probably seems like such a waste or cruel to animals (which I still am unsure how I feel about it) but, when you look at it, the sheep are killed quickly (if it's done right I suppose) so suffering is, inshallah, minimal. The sheep is not wasted either - everything is consumed. So you eat every part of the body (except possibly the hooves? I never saw what became of those) and the skin is dried and cleaned and used later as blankets or else the wool is taken and spun later. So the animal is being put to use and not wasted, as it probably would be in other parts of the world. Though I will say, the religious significance seems to have been lost over time. There wasn't much ceremony around the killing of the sheep - it was more of just an exciting spectacle people look forward to everywhere, with special food to go along with it. It's also been fairly heavily commercialized, as could be seen with all the advertisements the week or two before. But hey - look what's happened to Christmas. 

That's all I have for you for now. Sorry if the formatting is funky - it's taking me forever to do it all and I don't feel like fixing it 0:) I'll probably want some distraction from my ISP this week so inshallah I'll fill you in on the rest of what's been happening lately. Talk to you sooon. 

Word of the Day:

Inshallah - God-willing. Used as the English equivalent of 'hopefully' but soooo much cooler and powerful. Used all the time - will you come back and visit? - Inshallah. What time is your train arriving? 3:00 pm, inshallah. So. Good

Humdullah - Thank God. Kind of goes along with the theme of inshallah I guess. This word is also used a lot, and is pronounced differently according to how much you want to emphasize the word. So much fun to say.