Eid Kabir Part One

Eid Kabir

If you know anything about how things happen you know that nothing worth anything will come easy. I knew that but it doesn’t mean I believe it... It also doesn’t mean that I like that quote. I think it causes some people, maybe people like me, to go looking for a fight.

This whole past week was a big holiday, the Darchebab was closed, the kids didn’t go to school, family came from all over the country, and I had a sheep living on my roof for about a week. The holiday is called Eid Kabir. I think it has a fancier name, but I call it Eid Kabir and everyone seemed to know what the crazy American was talking about. I really enjoyed that this holiday is right next to Christmas because it made me feel like I wasn’t missing anything at all. All of the women in town have been cooking and baking for days, everyone has anew outfit to wear, the girls all have hena done, and everyone has their sheep.
Oh I should tell you that on the first morning of Eid every family in Morocco wakes up, goes to Mosque and comes home to kill a sheep. The idea is that they are sacrificing a sheep for God. With that being said that means that you have to know how to butcher the animal in a special way to make sure that the meat stays pure. My whole host family gathered on the roof and everyone loved watching has the sheep passed away and became what I have now been eating at every meal for the past week and a half. :)
Everyone had been asking me if I was ready to see the sheep killing and if I thought I could handle eating all that meat. I said of course I’m ready for this, I mean really it is Deer Season in Wisconsin, so something very similar is going on all around my house....that may have been the biggest lie I have ever told. I was ready for the American version of butchering and the American version of eating all that meat, not the Moroccan. The butchering wasn’t bad until I saw them take out the “guts” and start to clean out the stomach with water. I remembered some really rancid gut shot deer and how that smelled and just about lost it. I could not believe that my Haja was cleaning that out like it was a plastic bag.
*My Haja - My host fathers sister who lives with us. We call her Haja out of respect because she has been to Mecca.*
I also thought hey I really like chicken and could never get sick of it, but this could be a good change, plus there were good cuts of meat on that thing. The first part that we ate was the lungs, heart, liver and all other intestinal organs. They cubed it up and put it on kebabs. It wasn’t really that bad. We eat every part of this animal. Right now there is some part hanging on the clothes line wrapped in small intestine. It will hang there for three weeks and then we eat it. Yesterday for breakfast I ate brains and eggs followed by the face for lunch. The nose is very chewy... some call it Moroccan gum. :)
*Cultural Fact - Cuts of meat vary from country to country... a good cut of meat in Morocco is any cut of meat with bones.*