The 2nd A9ed

***WARNING*** this is kind of long and really pretty gross.

In late October I posted about the A9ed that was immediately following Ramadan. Roughly 2 months later the people here are celebrating the 2nd A9ed. This time, they take 3 days to celebrate when Abraham took Ishmael up the mountain to sacrifice him and at the last minute God provided a sheep instead. Yep...I said Ishmael. They don't believe that it was Isaac but Ishmael who went up the mountain. Anyways, so during this a9ed, anyone who is financially able is obligated to sacrifice a sheep to Allah for their family. It's a pretty strange thing to witness really.

Last night we went downstairs to visit my landlord since we just got back from Turkey and they invited us to come down and celebrate the A9ed with their family.

We went down this morning at about 9 am and they were all dressed up in their new clothes to celebrate. We had to wait a little while for the guy to come who would actually kill the sheep. When it comes to slaughtering sheep you can either call someone to come to your house or you can just hire one of the guys who walk around carrying an axe and some knives. They have a special guy that they use...it cost $10. Once he arrived we got right to it.

Oh yeah, throughout the whole thing I was holding my favorite 2-yr old so I'll include some of her comments as we go along.

Here's the before shot. The sheep has to be laying in a certain position and be cut in a certain area according to their religion. Here they guys are discussing how exactly they were going to get the sheep into that position.

'the sheep says baaaa, hear it?!?'

And the after shot....just in the middle of the street!

'What happened? Is the sheep OK? He's not OK?'

Then they hung him from the electric pole with some plastic cord and got at the skinning. At one point the plastic cord broke so they got a telephone cord and used that until it broke. Then they found some Internet wire and that held out until the end.

'What happened to his hiney? He got hurt?'

Here's the 'butcher' finishing off the head. He took that home as a souvenir...what that really means is that we didn't have to worry about eating the brain!

And we can't waste any parts....everything gets eaten eventually. Although, PTL, they didn't make us eat anything weird, just regular meat and some ribs.

This is what was left of our sheep. They just left it in the street.

And then here's my landlord's son and our dukan guy carrying the skins down the street to the mosque. Another rule about the sacrifice, you can't sell the skin but have to give it to the mosque. Keep in mind that this wasn't just our landlord's family doing this today, it was everyone in the neighborhood who could afford it...let's just say the street is a mess.



And here's me with my landlord's daughter and my favorite 2-yr old in the middle of my street, notice the sheep to the left.

Good thing that my dad raised me scaling fish and skinning animals, otherwise I probably would have been totally grossed out by all this and would have terribly offended my landlord when I couldn't watch. Hope this wasn't too gross for anyone. Let's just say be glad that you weren't here for the live show!