EID!

Eid Mubarak Saaid! Happy Eid.  So it is 10:15am, on Eid lftr day.   I would like to still be sleeping now, due to circumstances I will explain in a bit; however, I just woke up to someone banging on my door, yelling “IMANEEEEE NKRRRR!!!” (Erin, wake up!).  It was Hajja, my host dad’s brother’s wife, who came to our douar early this morning to celebrate Leid.  What I learned from this is that different holiday rules in apply in the US versus here.  At least in our family, waking people up Christmas morning was perfectly acceptable until Stephanie and I reached a certain age.  Now it is quite forbidden; one must wait until the whole family has naturally woken up.  Well here it isn’t quite like that.  Yesterday when I was leaving (at 3am), I said I will sleep in tomorrow, and my host mom said I couldn’t because it is Leid.  Hmm.  Interesting. 

 

It really is fun celebrating a holiday in another country, a holiday I have never celebrated before.  This is the end of Ramadan holiday, and it depends on the presence of the new moon, so the date is not set ahead of time.  Yesterday afternoon I went over to my host family’s and we broke fast and watched the news to see if today would be the end of Ramadan.  We found out at about 9pm, and I figured that meant, oh, fun, and let’s go to bed soon.  Oh no, not for the women at least.  It meant, pull out the 30kilos of flour, giant box of yeast, and make some Eid bread!  Yikes!  So my host sister Fadma and I spent a couple hours kneading this giant mass of soon-to-be bread.  We literally had to stand up and keep punching it it was so big.  Then, at about 11pm, we went with Ijjoi (host mom) to the neighbor’s house, where they have an oven made for this very occasion.  It is a giant mud oven, and the loaves of bread cook in just 3 or 4 minutes on hot coals covered with clay pieces.  The oven holds about 10 loaves at once, and that giant mass of bread of ours made about 30 loaves of bread.  The problem is, the whole surrounding area of houses had to use this one oven, so there was a very long line of bread mass when we arrived.  Needless to say, everyone helps everyone when her bread, and all of us had finished at about 3am. 

 

Meanwhile, we kept running the finished loaves back to the house, and at one point we heard a car.  Fadma’s brother, Brahim, was driving in from Rabat (13 hours) for Laid, so we went to go say hello to him.  Earlier in the day, her other brother, Saaid arrived from Casablanca.  So we went into the house, and what did we see?  Well, Brahim, but also Arquia, Khadija, and Arquia’s two children, Sana and Omar.  They all live up north and although they told their mom they couldn’t make it down for Laid, they surprised her!!!  How sweet!!  It is funny, it isn’t even my family, and I was so excited for the surprise.