morocco-bound: and to think I used to be a vegetarian

view from my front door on a particularly foggy day

Happy early Thanksgiving! This week marked 8 months in country, and by and large it's gone by quickly, but spending the holidays here and without my family will be strange. It's pretty cold here, as measured by my very precise assessment that I can see my breath in my house at all times. Last week it snowed down the road from Azrou, but so far all we've had here is a lot of very chilly rain. My neighbors all have their little wood stoves going, but I don't have one, so I mostly just wear a lot of clothing and huddle under blankets (and occasionally invite myself into people's houses to sit in front of their stoves, which is totally acceptable here.) I don't have big plans for Thanksgiving, because we have a week-long training near Rabat at the beginning of December, and I'm looking forward to going south (to warmer regions!) for Christmas and New Year's, which is a lot of time out of site. (Side note: if you send me your address within the next two weeks, I'll send you a Christmas postcard!)

Speaking of holidays, last week was a big one here: technically called Eid al-Adha, usually translated as the Festival of Sacrifice, most people here just call it Eid l-Kbir, or the Big Holiday. (Eid l-Sghir, the Little Holiday, comes at the end of Ramadan.) Eid is based on the story in the Quran (which will sound familiar) when God commands Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ismail, then stays his hand at the last minute and tells him to sacrifice a lamb instead.

To remember Ibrahim's devotion to God, every Muslim family that can afford it must sacrifice a sheep on Eid. The wealthier the family, the larger the sheep, partially because they're supposed to give some of it to poor families that can't afford their own sheep. (Supposedly some super-rich families in Fez slaughter a whole cow.) For two weeks before Eid, there were people with lone ewes and rams everywhere, even crossing city streets. (The TV news showed someone loading a ram into the luggage compartment of a bus.)

he definitely knew what was coming

I spent the holiday with my friend Kristin and her host family, since she and I were both a little nervous about all the blood and guts. The day started early, when the men said a prayer and cut the ram's throat in the field next to their house. The animal made some awful noises and thrashed around for awhile, but it wasn't quite as gross as I expected. After cutting off the head, they cut a small hole in one of the back legs and blew into it to make skinning the ram easier. After the skin came off, they hung the body from a tree to drain the blood, and took out all the organs. The women were in charge of cleaning all the organs out, which included squeezing the poo out of the colon and scooping the half-digested grass out of the stomach. Yum.

All the edible parts are cooked and eaten or preserved within a few days, usually in a traditional order that reflects how quickly each organ will go bad. For lunch and afternoon tea on the first day, every family grills kebabs of chunks of liver wrapped in fat. We also ate heart and what I think was spleen, although my internal organ vocabulary is a little limited. Most of it was surprisingly good, although I eat so little meat in general that it was kind of overwhelming. Then, for dinner, we were served the head, just cooked in oil in a pressure cooker. I ate a few bites of cheek (I think), which was fatty but tolerable, but then came the brains. I ate one bite, immediately felt like I was going to vomit, and politely declined any more, to the great amusement of all the Moroccans present. I think of myself as an adventurous eater, so hey, at least I tried it ... but no more brains for me any time soon.

Here are some pictures of the whole process. WARNING: they are a little graphic, so don't look if you don't want to see blood.