Tabaski!

It's Wednesday night around 11:30pm. Yesterday was the gigantic holiday we call "Tabaski" in this part of the world. As I mentioned earlier, during Tabaski, a sheep is slain to honor Abraham's sacrifice. According to the story, when forced to make a sacrifice, he chose a sheep over his son, thus the continuing tradition. However, with my family being quite large (and wealthy), we had two sheep. The volunteer that I replaced (Pete), came for the festivities. Since his new host family in Thies is Catholic, they obviously did not slaughter sheep on this grand day...weird. Thus, at around 10am yesterday morning, the first of two sheep was laid on the ground, facing Mecca. A small hole was dug into the sand for the blood to flow in. Quickly and efficiently, my host father slit its throat, with my host brothers holding it down until the deed was finished. Without any delay, the second sheep was brought in. Once again, a swift slash with the knife led to another dead mammal. Immediately, the family started skinning the sheep, which Pete and I helped with (I had my fancy bubu on, so all I did was hold the legs up in the air while my host brothers did most of the skinning). Within 30 minutes, ribs were cooking on the grill and the only visible remains of the sheep were the skinless heads, with the eyeballs jutting out. I took many pictures of the events, and even recorded one gruesome video, but they will not be shown on this blog.

Having eaten a meal's worth of ribs by noon, we had another lunch made up of potatoes, onions, and yes, sheep meat. Later, around 2, we had another large portion of meat. After an quick nap, another serving was given to us around 4. From 5 or so until 10pm, we walked around to different households, asking for forgiveness (a tradition during Tabaski. You ask others to forgive you in order to start fresh with the new year). At 10, we had dinner. As you can imagine, there was meat, and lots of it. In fact, the meat has been ongoing, as we even ate it for dinner tonight. To sum it all up, Tabaski was absolutely exhausting. Even though my Wolof has been improving, I felt really inadequate at times since every household we went to grilled me in Wolof to see how I measured up to Pete. It really got me motivated to improve my Wolof as quickly as possible so I can actually handle my own when it comes to these events. Other than that, it was a good time and I look froward to next year's Tabaski.

Tonight we went to a pre-wedding dance ritual. During this event, many people gather together to dance and poke fun at the respective families of the bride and the groom. My host sisters asked me if I wanted to go, so i tagged along. It was a pretty big deal, with tons of music and laughing. I was having a great time when suddenly a fairly heavy set man came up to shake my hand. The conversation went something like this:
"Fallou Gallas, why are you here?"
"My name is Fallous Gallas Niang. I am replacing Mustafa here. I am here to watch the dancing" (This is approximately how idiotic I sound in Wolof)
"Something something something...blah blah only women here...blah blah blah men elsewhere"
It was at that moment that I realized that I was the only male figure in the compound over the age of 6. It didn't seem to be a big deal, but there I stood, not having shaved in a month (with my mustache growing like a California wildfire...thus making me look like a creep) amongst a crowd of all women. Nobody else said anything about it, so I just sat and enjoyed the show until my host sisters decided it was time to go home. Now I'm off to get some sleep. Tomorrow I'm going to a shoe workshop to help the owners with their accounting and their order forms. Friday through Sunday I'll be in Dakar. We have a regional meeting on Friday to welcome all the new volunteers to the region, and Saturday we have 2 softball games (I went 3 for 3 in my last game...so watch out!). Until next time, ba ci kanaam!