L-Eid Kbir

L-Eid Kbir was the craziest holiday I have ever experienced. Let me first give you a little background on this holiday. In Morocco, “L-Eid Kbir” means the “Big Feast.” All the Islamic world celebrates this day by sacrificing a sheep. The sheep is sacrificed for all the sins made during the last year. Every family must have its own sheep and those who can’t afford one can buy a lamb or sometimes an animal is donated to the poor families. On the morning of L-Eid the men rise early, dress in their best clothes and go pray at the mosque. Then they come home, eat breakfast, and wait until the King has killed his sheep. When the King’s sheep is dead, the head of the family kills the sheep. Then the sheep is eaten in a way determined by local tradition.

Leading up to the holiday, I had a little miscommunication with my Moudir about when I was supposed to work. He told me that nobody would be coming before the week of L-Eid or during so I could take a holiday break. The next day I didn’t show up and the other Moudir called me to ask where I was and that I had thirty students waiting for me in my classroom. I ran to the Dar Chebab, quickly pulled a lesson out of my ass, and taught my class. Turns out, I was supposed to work that week. Two days before L-Eid the students stopped showing up and I also noticed he taxi stand in our town had never been busier. People were hitchhiking, hopping into pick-up trucks, orange trucks, the back of mopeds, pretty much anything to get them to where they needed to go.

Saturday December 29 (the day before L-Eid) I went with my family to the farm and waited for the big day to arrive. Sunday was probably one of the strangest, but memorable days of my life. I witnessed a sheep slaughter, ate lung kebabs, and just saw a lot of blood and animal parts being tossed around. I was at the farm where close to thirty people live. Since the family is so large and because they are one of the wealthier families around these parts, we slaughtered three sheep. I did not witness the first slaughter because I was eating breakfast with the women, but I did see a young boy walk by carrying a decapitated head dripping with blood, so that quickly ended breakfast for me. Because of the weird gender roles here that I'm still trying to figure out, the women were not allowed to participate in the slaughter, but that did not stop me from watching from the rooftop. Most families in Morocco allow everyone in the family to participate in the slaughter, but things are different at the farm where the women work very hard all day long cleaning and preparing meals for the men.

Back to the slaughter: after the sheep's throat was slit, I watched it struggle for what seemed a very long time. It was a slow death and there was a lot of blood. The sheep didn't really die until its head was fully decapitated. Then, the men took the dead body and hung it from its hooves with a rope. What they did next still puzzles me, and maybe some of you hunters out there can shed some light on the reason why this was done, but the men took a hose that is used for filling air in tires and crammed in the sheep's butt and blew the body up like a balloon. Next, they skinned it, so maybe the air was used to get the skin loose? Anyway, after it was skinned, they hacked it up into a lot of pieces and after a while I stopped watching.

For the rest of the day I sat with the women outside and watched them prepare the meat. The first thing they did was make the lung kebabs. These were not my favorite, but I ate one. After the kebabs, it was really fascinating to watch my host aunt prepare the heads to eat. She threw them on a fire to burn off the hair and then she took this giant axe and hacked off the horns. Then she fried them a bit more in the fire and told me she would put them in the refrigerator to wait until they cooked them. For the rest of the day I worried about those heads and what would become of them but at dinner we had a regular tajine (kind of like a meaty stew) without head.

That night was pretty boring. I taught some of the kids how to play Uno and so we played until we noticed the movie Titanic was on tv. Let me tell you something about Moroccans: they have a very strange obsession with Celine Dion. I hear her music everywhere! At the cyber, at the store, and always on tv. So, it seemed quite fitting that at exactly midnight, as I was silently celebrating the new year, the movie ended and the song My Heart Will Go On played. Everyone in the room got very serious and starting singing along, trying to get the words right, and I found this all really funny, so I started pretending I was serious about this song too, and pretended to sing into a microphone with my eyes closed, but nobody laughed. After the song ended, I went to bed. Kind of an anticlimatic new year.

At breakfast the next morning, I was a little nervous when I saw that we were eating tajine. Tajine is not usually served at breakfast. My instincts were correct when I saw what was inside the tajine. Some unrecognizable sheep parts mixed together with what I could recognize as the sheep's private parts. I was offered some sheep testicles and politely declined, so some other woman snatched them up and devoured them. I was brave enough to dip my bread into the meat juice, but even then I felt a little ill. One of my fellow volunteers here said to me the other day on the phone, "You'd think eating all that sheep stomach would digest nicely in my own stomach, but for some reason the two stomachs just don't seem to be getting along in there." I agree with him completely.

I have pictures posted of this day.