All of the happy phrases we know!
Today was our first Eid al-Adha, or Eid Kbir (Big Feast, in the local darija) in Morocco, and it was definitely somethin'. Of course, we've heard all about it and researched it some and read blog posts from volunteers in previous years, but it's always different in person, you know. And by different, I mean more intense, but in a good way.
The people we know in Taounate are all great humans, and we had six total invitations to different families for the whole sha-bang. We chose to go with the family that we broke fast with the most during Ramadan for the part where a ram is sacrificed and the beginning of the day, then we had a snack and dinner with our host family. We ate a lot of ram, in other words.
I'm going to try and go through the day chronologically from here, including pictures. If you have problems seeing blood or don't want to see the in-process pictures of the slaughter, maybe cover them up with a post-it while you read... because we have quite a few of them. It's not pleasant to look at, but it's an important part of the day. In fact, it's so important that we saw it done on national television a few different times. Fun fact: the King's rams are very clean and very big.
We went to our friends' house at 9:30 this morning, with some homemade cookies and kettle corn as a gift(!), to get things started. They live on the sixth floor of their building, and have a roof where the ram has been for a few days. He was a good lookin' fella and cost them 47,000 ryal - sounds expensive, yeah? Well it is. And it's a big deal to get a good one. That comes to 2350 dirham, or just a little less than $250.
Here he is with some little boys dressed in their best for the holiday:
After we had some tea and went through a series of greetings, they started tying him up and getting everything ready. In order for the whole process to be Halal, the ram can never see the knife; he's not supposed to know what's coming to him. At the same time, they had us look across the street while the neighbors killed theirs. I think it was a way of leading us in to the process gently. It's easier to see something far away than up close. This family also knows that this is our first time experiencing most of these customs and traditions.
Then, well, they slit his throat and waited for him to bleed out.
Then the real process began. In order to separate the skin from the meat bits, you have to get a layer of air in between them. I had heard about this part before, but wasn't expecting the dad to make a good cut in one leg then blow it up with his mouth. This year was an unusual one, though, because they usually have another dude come to do the throat-slitting and they usually get an air pump for the skin part. But they decided to do it the traditional way this year.
It was crazy to watch it just blow up like a balloon. The next step was to hang it up by the ankles, take the head off, and work all of the skin off. Once the skin was completely off, which took about a half hour (still not sure what's going to happen to it), he slit it open below the ribs and it was time to take out all the internal organs. This part was a whole family affair - even the little kids were helping. Conveniently, they assume we have no idea what we're doing and they set up a seating area for us outside so we could drink some tea while we watched.
That was the hard part. Now the sheep meat has to rest/drain for a day and we'll eat that tomorrow with couscous - we'll be with the same family, so plenty of pictures of that, too!
For today, we ate the inside bits. But first, and definitely most importantly, it needed to be cleaned. It took a long time, but it was also cool to see how thorough they were with every single step. And nothing gets wasted! It's an awesome process.
After all the cleaning, the mom brought out the liver (which she apparently took into the kitchen and cooked at some point...) and the dad cut up pieces of caul fat and wrapped it around small pieces of liver and put them on skewers to be grilled. Liver and fat kabobs for breakfast! Not a joke.
Honestly, with some salt and cumin, they aren't bad. It's called Boufaf. We also had some large intestine that was wrapped around the skewers and grilled for a while. Once again, if you add some salt and cumin, it just tastes like grilled fatty meat stuff. We also had some heart, throat, spleen, and kidney - at some point, I couldn't really tell them apart any more.
At this point, we had to take our leave, but not before securing that we would be there for couscous tomorrow!
Next, we ran home quickly to grab the cookies we made for our host family and went over there. Luckily, the sacrifice was already done, and the skin removed. We just had another chance to eat the Boufaf and some other internal organs, but then also a lot of cookies and tea.
This family knows a few other Americans, so they weren't upset when we said we needed to go home and sleep for a while. Which we definitely did.
Our night was capped off by going back to our host family for dinner at 9 and eating some beef. Host-sister, Najwa, doesn't like sheep organs so much, so Mama Fatima made some grilled beef, which was tasty. Of course, we also had a few pots of tea.
Now, we're home, eating some Pepto, and preparing for more family and sheep times tomorrow!
I, Alexis, also had the very important task of keeping their new kitten, Liya, away from the mess today. I clearly took it very seriously.
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