So there are currently two sheep carcasses hanging from a ladder in the middle of my house, strips of fat on the laundry rack (with the wet clothes), blood all over the floor, and I think heart and liver cooking in the kitchen, but the 3id is not actually as hard for me as I expected. The 3id is the holiday celebrating the miracle of Allah providing Abraham with a ram to sacrifice instead of his son, and what do Moroccans do? Yep, they sacrifice rams. For the last week or so, Moroccan families have been buying rams and keeping them on their terraces, hallways and apartments. I was lucky in that my fam kept theirs in my host father’s currently empty shop, so I didn’t have sheep in the house until this morning. (I would not have expected them to be so loud—I’ve been listening to sheep outbursts for the last few days at the apartment, and if they were in the house, I don’t think we would have slept.)
Last night, my host grandparents and aunt came over, so we spent a festive evening eating two snacks and a dinner (at midnight), and I woke up this morning to my dad and brother dragging two big, mean-looking rams into the house. The slaughtering is actually quite a process—it took about three hours to kill, skin and gut the two of them. Mostly I hid out in the back of the house with Boutaina, but gradually I got more confident and actually watched the second one’s throat cut. Death is not pretty. I began to think about how most Americans are so disconnected and squeamish about their meat. In Croatia, we threw meat in a grinder and made sausages, and Moroccans slaughter sheep in their apartments, but I can hardly deal with raw meat. (granted, I don’t really eat meat when I’m in charge of my own meals) I think that as a meat eater (at all) it was an important process to watch, but I’ll have to admit, I was rather relieved that my camera is broken and so I had an excuse for not taking pictures.
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