Mike in the Maghreb: Eid part deux:: holidays moroccan and american

I really should write in this thing so that I can look at it post peace corps and convince myself that this stuff actually happened. Things have been fairly busy- last week was the biggest holiday of the islamic year. Reasonably enough, it's called "the big holiday" in arabic. Every family that can afford it buys a sheep and sacrifices it and then feasts on innards and meat for about 2 weeks. Our sheep refused to die, but I'd rather not remember that so I won't write more. You can see in one of the pictures below the aftermath of Krista's host brother wrestling with the sheep as it was in its death throes.

It seemed like the entire population of our town gathered together on top of the tallest hill in town, separated women and men, and prayed in the morning. I have a few pictures of that below. I felt very foreign walking through this, but still took some pictures because what the hell, I can't stand out any more than I already do.

After a week of moving from house to house and eating lots of sheep guts (intestines, heart, lungs, stomach, etc.) we went to Oujda, the big city, for an american style holiday. A number of volunteers in the group ahead of us are done with their service so we had to send them out in style. This week has been brutal workwise, and will be even worse tomorrow. It's been rough but one program in particular is taking off which I'm really excited about: IYF. I'll talk about this in another post soon, if I can pull it together. Another wedding. I swear to god this is the last wedding I will go to in morocco. Tomorrow night, I expect to stay up until the sun rises.

hill prayer. good move by the lady with the chair

good looking sheep

sacrifice time. The holiday celebrates when god gave abraham a sheep to kill instead of the original request: his first-born son Isaac

abdelaali: 1, sheep: 0
on a side note: I had a lengthly conversation with abdelaali as we were watching tv. It was a channel I'd never seen before, the state-run syrian station. Lots of videos of heroic looking soldiers shooting stuff, almost pornagraphically violent, with proud music and lots of flag waving (including one flag which essentially means destroy israel), and so forth. abdelaali then told me about how much he likes Assad and how there was no proof chemical weapons were because of him and that it was a set-up and so on. It would be impossible to overstate the influence television has on people's opinions here.