Belated Eid Mubarak! This week has been very interesting and busier than normal. Eid al-Adha is not a celebration I was super familiar with growing up, so it’s been enlightening to compare and contrast how the holiday is celebrated in Morocco versus the United States.
To my understanding, Eid for my friends who celebrate it in America is an exciting endeavor—friends’ families arrange ahead of time for a quality cut of meat and it is a time to dress up, eat a ton of tasty food and enjoy the time with family and friends. In rural Morocco, it is still a time to gather with family, but there is a lot more prep work when live animals are involved.
I arrived bright and early to my host family’s house on Monday morning. The vibe was “alright, Anna’s here, let’s get moving!” My host family doesn’t live directly in the downtown area, which worked to their advantage on Eid because it meant there was a lot more space to do everything. I briefly said hello to what would become my lunch, and then my host dad and brother took it outside to the big dirt patch to actually perform the sacrifice. It was surprisingly quick.
Some families in my town prefer to hire a butcher to do everything, but my host family was like a well oiled machine, with everyone basically on standby for their specific tasks. As soon as my host dad and brother dragged the sheep back onto the patio, it was all hands on deck. I’ll do my best to recount—my role during most of this was to “sit and watch” according to my host mom, but I promise I helped clean everything up. If you get a little queasy around what I’m about to describe, perhaps scroll down a bit.
I don’t really know what the best word would be to describe the entire process. Cleaning? Processing? Preparing? Anyway, once the sheep was back on the patio, the first step is to remove (cut off) the head and feet and set them aside for later.
The next step is to skin it. It turns out this step is a lot easier if the sheep has a lot of air inside it, which would explain why my host sister quickly appeared with a bike pump and quite literally reinflated the sheep. Then it was time to hang up the sheep to pull the skin off, which my host dad did by rearranging some tendons and hanging it up on a bar that juts out from their garage.
After the skin was off, time was of the essence—the organs go bad really quickly and it was important to get them out and clean them as soon as possible. This involves a lot of separate buckets and water. This part was not unlike a dissection I did in high school biology; my host dad cut the sheep open, took all the organs out one by one and set them in buckets for my host mom to clean. My host dad was kind enough to drain the stomach outside of the patio because apparently it doesn’t smell the best. One particularly interesting part was when he blew into the trachea and reinflated the lungs briefly after removing them. I’ll spare the details about what’s involved with cleaning the intestines.
It was interesting to hear from other volunteers about what was involved at their sites. Some people had sheep with tapeworms (!). Others had either beef or goat and a few more stuck to vegetables. Unfortunately, a lot of other volunteers got quite sick from everything for one reason or another. I got lucky because my site is not in the middle of a severe water shortage, which meant we were able to sufficiently clean everything; this isn’t necessarily the case in other parts of the south. As volunteers, sometimes cultural celebrations like this are cool to participate in but can also be difficult because they involve a lot of boundary setting on our part—some people aren’t comfortable with certain things or eating certain parts of the animal, and sometimes our local counterparts don’t understand why we feel that way.
I was very open with my host family that I had never eaten a lot of the things they were eating before and sometimes my stomach doesn’t feel good with “new meat” and they were very understanding. For lunch on Monday we had a dish called boulfaf, which is grilled sheeps’ liver in kebab form, wrapped in fat and followed up with green tea. It honestly was pretty tasty—I’m sure the fat helped—and my host mom was very adamant that I didn’t drink cold water, just the tea. I was curious about this, and according to Google, drinking specifically hot green tea after fatty meals can aid digestion. My host family does lunch outside on Eid, and the vibe of grilling kebabs and eating under a makeshift tent was quite nice.
We had cleaned the patio with a ton of bleach and water and hung up the sheep elsewhere before lunch, so after lunch my host mom abruptly put me down for a nap. If you know me, I’m awful at napping so I’m glad I planned ahead and brought my Kindle just in case. Nothing like slamming down 250 pages of Dune while in a quasi-food coma.
I made my way home before dinner; my host family pressure-cooks the rest of the organs with some vegetables and chickpeas to create a sort of stew. The verdict on the taste of the stomach is mixed among volunteers.
A key part of Eid tradition in Morocco is that most families eat every single part of the sheep, including the head and feet. I went to another family’s house for lunch on Tuesday, where we had grilled kebabs with goat meat and then the sheeps’ head and feet as the main course. I was very clear that it was my first time trying the sheeps’ head. The taste and texture were very unique and honestly not my favorite. Luckily, my friend whose house I was at doesn’t really like the taste of it either, so I was able to try a little bit but it wasn’t a huge deal that I didn’t eat a ton of it.
On Wednesday, we had kebabs again and then the main course was tagine with some of the more tender parts of the sheep, mixed with onions and prunes. Lamb or beef with onions, apricots and prunes is probably my favorite traditional Moroccan dish; the mix of sweet and savory is unique and, when appropriately seasoned, is very indulgent.
Overall, it was very interesting this week to learn a little more about Eid firsthand from people who celebrate the holiday in a very traditional manner. Some aspects of the last week have been very unique in ways I wasn’t expecting, and I was nervous about how everything would settle in my stomach, but overall I’m proud of myself for at least trying everything, including the brain! That’s all for now, and as always, more to come!
Anna Weber 