Eid el-Kbir

Eid el-Kbir or Aid Al Kabir
was celebrated here a few weeks ago and I am finally getting around to posting a blog about it. (for info on why this holiday is celebrated click on the link)

Here are some pics of everyone flooding into the Mosque for the requisite prayers on this holiday.




This holiday comes with lots of unfamiliar activity for me. We were driving on our way to church Sunday morning (on New Year's Eve) and I thought I saw a man standing on the side of the road with a bloody apron and a giant butcher knife (also bloody) in his hand. I quickly dismissed this as some kind of glance-hallucination. Then, as we drove along further, I noticed that all the people on the street were men with knives, some with buckets, some with freshly blood-stained aprons. After a moment of sheer and complete panic I began to realize that this might be related to the holiday. On this holiday, after all the required prayers are said by the male members of the household, the eldest male is given the honor of slaughtering and sacrificing a "howlie" (native term for a ram). If that is not possible, for a variety of reasons, a butcher may be hired to come and do the slaughtering instead. This is where the men on the street corners come in. They were actually waiting for someone to hire them. The knives and aprons had their obvious uses... but the buckets... well, lets just say that it gets a bit messy when one is sacrificing, and things are tidier if there is a bucket handy.




This is event is a family affair - I imagine it would be just like the early days of America when people readied the turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. Here is a family getting ready to sacrifice two rams. If you look closely you will see them in the background.






After the "howlie" is sacrificed the animal is skinned and the meat is prepared... all except for the head. The heads are charred on streetcorners over homemade fires... apparently when sheep brains are cooked in such a way it is considered a real delicacy! Yummy! It was like a scene out of an armaggeddon movie where piles of trash lay burning on every streetcorner...

























By the next day all the fires and evidence of those fires were tidily cleared away and you might never have guessed the scene of the previous day had happened at all... except for the piles and piles of sheepskins needing to be tanned.