Tabaski
The beginning of November marked the celebration of the Islamic holiday Tabaski, also known as the Festival of Sacrifice. Tabaski commemorates the willingness of Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ishmael in obedience to God. At the last minute, God provided a ram to be sacrificed in reward for Ibrahim’s obedience to sacrifice his son. In commemoration of this event, Muslims around the world celebrate by slaughtering a ram and dividing it up and sharing it with friends and family. Tabaski occurs approximately 2 months and 10days after Korite; this year it fell on November 7.So how was my very first Tabaski? Let’s just say it won’t be going down as my favorite holiday. A holiday that involves eating sheep at 10am until bed time around 9pm, definitely not a holiday I look forward too. The day before our celebration began, everyone was preparing for our big feast, all the women were busy at work cleaning the compound and getting all the food ready while the men were picking out the best and biggest sheep to slaughter. That afternoon the women all sat arond getting their hair braided while all the men shaved their heads along with any face hair(something to do with the cleanliness for God). I decided to let three little girls braid my hair in the spirit of Tabaski..big mistake! First of all, having three little girls braiding your hair at the same time is never a good idea (it hurts and there is a lot of bickering going on). Second of all, little girls cannot braid, it’s a hot mess, with your hair braided in every direction. I looked like Medusa.
The air the next morning was filled with lots of excitement. The little boys especially were so excited to help with the slaughtering of a sheep. The men and the little boys had gotten all dressed up early in the morning and went around the community visiting friends and asking for forgiveness. Around 10am , the men had returned and it was time to sacrifice a sheep. My little old Dad was the one who got to sacrifice the sheep, which is a huge honor..it represents respect and wisdom. Im sorry but I have no pictures of them slaughtering a sheep..I made sure not to be around for that but I do have a before picture of the sheep they chose to sacrifice. My family also killed along with a sheep 3 goats just to make sure there was enough meat for everybody. While the men were off cleaning and skinning the meat , I was with the women helping out in the kitchen with all the cooking..more like peeling potatoes and cutting up onions for what felt like hours! Once the men were all finished with the meat, it was the women’s turn to cook it all! And the women cooked every part of that sheep (even it’s testicles)!
Breakfast started at 10:30 with the women serving up the liver of the sheep..yummy! I took a polite bite and then gave the rest to the kids. After that the women then brought out ribs which weren’t too bad actually a little tasty but it was just way too early for me to be eating sooo much meat . However I know my Dad and brother back home would enjoy it, they would call it a breakfast for champions.
By the time breakfast was over I was stuffed..and we still hadn’t eaten lunch! Lunch was very similar to the lunch we served for Korite…meat, potatoes and an onion sauce. Once again, everyone from the Ndoain (my last name) community of Mboula all came together for lunch with all their huge bowls of food and when the food was served, there was noo way I could eat anymore meat! I was already sick. There is a saying that people say for Tabaski, they ask you if you have eaten so much meat that you now have diahrrea! I thought this was hilarious right up until after lunch when I was sick with diahrrea and running to the bathroom every 5 minutes!
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| My Ndoain family |
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All the family together for Tabaski eating lots of...
MEAT
MEAT
MEAT
and more Meat
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| Baby Ida w/ her Aunt Ida (who she is named after) |
After lunch, the little kids got all dressed up in new fancy clothes and went around the village showing them off, while everyone just lounged around way too full to even move! Not too much happened the rest of the afternoon since everyone was so full and I was stuck in the bathroom. It was around 4 when I started to feel a little better that I got dressed up in fancy Senegalese clothing which my family really appreciated and the people of my village went absolutely nuts seeing me look all Senegalese! That night as the holiday was ending I thought to myself Thank God..no more meat! Boy was I wrong, just because Tabaski was ending did not mean the end of meat! We had cheeb u yapp (rice and meat) for dinner and I was informed by another volunteer that they will continue to eat the meat for days after the holiday..they killed so much meat and they make sure to eat it all. They weren’t lying..the next morning I had bread with meat and an onion sauce, for lunch more cheeb u yapp, and for dinner we had this type of beef stew with one of the sheep’s head in the middle of the bowl (eeww). Luckily for me I didn’t have to stick around for another day of eating meat because I had to go and meet my other fellow Team Djolof members for our regional meeting in Linguere. We also were meeting our two new Agriculture volunteers, Erin and Bonnie, new member to our Team Djolof (were growing as a region now there’s 14 of us!). Which means Fae, Andy, Andrew, Sarah, Mac, and me are no longer the babies of the region..yaaay! |
| Baby Ida in her Tabaski outfit!! |
My New Friend
This month I also made a new friend in the most unfortunate circumstances. I was sitting in my compound when I heard all this ruckus. The kids had found this little adorable puppy behind my compound and thought it would be fun to throw rocks at it and beat the poor puppy up with a stick. In Senegalese culture, dogs/puppies are considered bad because they can bite and tetanus shots do not exist in the local village health clinic if one does get bit..so it can be dangerous. And then there are cats/kittens which by Senegalese standard are just considered gross and ugly. Senegalese people hate dogs and cats, especially female ones because they can reproduce. Unfortunately they take to beating or even sometimes killing these precious creatures. And if you know me well, you know just how much I love animals..especially dogs!!! This has been a huge cultural adjustment for me here because they really don’t know how to treat or take care of any animals like their horses, or donkeys (PETA would absolutely hate Senegal). Animals here just look absolutely miserable!! Anyways back to my story, there was just no way I could turn my back on this poor little puppy…so in my fury I chased the kids away with a little stick I found (I was not my usual self..I had been in village way too long) and there I found the cutest, little puppy that was just so terrified. It took a good 5mins to get the puppy to trust me and to come out from hiding but as soon as it did I was attached. I just had one little problem, this little puppy was a female and there was no way my family would ever let me keep her. I decided to take this time to try and teach my family a little about American culture. I told them how dogs over in America are people’s pets, how they are domesticated and trained and how much Americans love them. I also told them that it is illegal to hurt a dog and if you practice animal cruelty you can pay a huge fine or even go to jail. My family just thought this concept was the weirdest thing, it was just too much of a foreign concept for them to grasp. They also thought I was so weird the way I interacted with the dog, petting her, feeding her left over rice, giving her something to lay on and talking to her (mind you I was going a little crazy in village). I named my new friend Nala. My family said I could keep her in my own back yard for a few days until I figured out just what I wanted to do with her. I took this time to try and teach the kids in my family how to interact with a puppy, like gently petting it and playing with it..they seemed to catch on. Saer, my older brother’s son, helped me feed her every morning. But no progress from my mom or dad..the dog had to go.
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| Saer taking care of Nala |
I decided to bring Nala with me to the regional house and see if the other volunteers would allow her to become yet another one of our house dogs. I also had to worry about Nala getting along with the other dogs Sparky and Helen Keller. Everybody loved Nala, except for the name. She now has 4 different names because no one could agree on a name, so I call her Nala, Kim calls her Alan (which is her brother’s name back home and is also Nala spelled backwards), Justin calls her Harriet Tubman, and Fae likes to call her nugget. As for Sparky and Helen, well it took them a little getting used to Nala and all the attention we were giving her but they are dealing with it. Our little family is growing so much!
Say hello to our little Nala/ Nugget/ Alan/ Harriet Tubman...
A VERY SENEGALESE THANKSGIVING!
As I said in the beginning of my blog..this was my very first Thanksgiving away from home so of course I was a feeling a little homesick in the days leading up to the big turkey day. I started to think about my Thanksgiving traditions…like going for a walk with my Dad and the dogs, watching the Macy’s Day Parade and the National Dog Show, arguing and causing trouble with my brother, being able to finally sing Christmas carols, pulling names for our secret santa party, and of course eating pumpkin cheesecake. As homesick as I was, I made the best of Thanksgiving here in Senegal with new friends and new memories!
We have these wonderful missionaries from Iowa who live here in Linguere, Senegal and they are just way to kind and generous to us. They decided this year that they wanted to host Thanksgiving and invited all 14 of us to their house for the holiday. We decided that for their generosity, we would buy a turkey for the missionairies to cook. I don’t know which one us came up with this idea but we obviously forgot that they don’t sell Turkeys here like they do back in America. They are not already killed, skinned and packaged like they are in supermarkets. The day before Thanksgiving, Abby (volunteer) showed up to the house with this giant, white, live turkey that we all had helped pay for. I took one look at it, noticed it was alive and asked “Why is not dead.” Abby then explained that we would be having to kill and clean this turkey because that part was not negotiated into the price of the turkey and the guy wanted some extra ridiculous amount to do the work for us. So Abby then just assumed that someone at the house surely knew how to kill a Turkey…boy was she wrong. We all took one look at it and said in unison “I’m not killing it!” We spent about an hour trying to figure out who would be the one to kill it. Justin and Abby both manned up and decided that they would do the biding but first they had to google “how to kill a turkey.” They brought out our biggest knife we had and sharpened it as best they could. It took two other people along with Justin to hold down the turkey while Abby got ready to strike the turkey in the neck (I wanted nothing to do with this…I can barely kill anything, except insects, I’ve gotten very good at that since I’ve been here). Abby’s first chop didn’t even make a dent in the turkey’s neck…she tried again and it barely cut the turkey’s neck. Now the turkey started to freak out and tried to flop out of everyone’s grip. I felt so bad for the turkey..it was so painful to watch the poor thing suffer like this. Abby had to re-sharpen the knife and then went at it another two times before she could chop the head off. As soon as the head fell off, everyone let go of the turkey thinking it was all over, we couldn’t have been more wrong because as soon as they all let go, the turkey’s body started flopping around on the ground. Everyone started running away screaming, while blood was flying everywhere from the flopping turkey body. It was hilarious, I wished I had a video camera to record it. We had no idea that once you cut off the head of the turkey the body would continue to move and flop…google didn’t mention that part. Finally we got a hold of the body and after a couple minutes it had stopped moving. I will never forget that, the people of Linguere must of thought we were crazy or dying..we had so many people come check on us to see if everything was alright. The dogs had a field day with that turkey…they got to eat all the bones and intestines of it. Even little Nala got her fair share although I’m pretty sure she eat way too much for her belly was sooo bloated!
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| Abby with our alive Turkey dinner |
We decided to ask some nice Senegalese women to help show us how to clean a turkey since we didn’t want to risk any more surprises. I was hard at work on trying to find a Thanksgiving recipe that I could cook here in Senegal so I could contribute to our Turkey feast. I found a honey glazed carrot dish that just so happened to have ingredients that I could find at our local market as well as a ginger baked sweet potatoe casserole (although I surely thought I would have to improvise on this one because I didn’t think Linguere market would have any ginger). To my surprise though, I was able to find ginger as well as all the other ingredients that I needed. I was even able to find parsely which I used as a garish on the carrots as well as the instant mashed potatoes we cooked (thank you America for sending us that..they were delicious).
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| My carrot dish |
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| The instant mashed potatoes |
I awoke the next day to the start of my very first Senegalese Thanksgiving and let me tell you I couldn’t have wished for a better Senegalese Thanksgiving. We started our festivities out with some Senegalese style Mimosas which consisted of a sack of red wine with some fruit juice (I know what your thinking..yes the wine really comes in a sack) and some holiday movies to put us in the spirit. It’s really hard to get into that holiday spirit especially when you’re the only ones in the whole country celebrating Thanksgiving. No matter, we stilled made the best of it. I prepped and cooked my two dishes all morning and it almost felt like I was back home helping my mom in the kitchen only I had new friends helping instead of my mom. Our feast at the missionairies was a dream!! I really wasn’t expecting much but it was just like Thanksgiving back home. As soon as I walked in the door, my mouth dropped to the floor. I couldn’t believe all the food I was seeing..all my favorite Thanksgiving dishes! We had this beautiful turkey with gravy, stuffing, green bean casserole, cream corn, mashed potatoes, a chicken casserole that Justin had made (just in case something went wrong with the turkey), my glazed carrots and baked sweet potatoe dish (which if I do say so myself turned out quite delicious) and to top it off, three pumpkin pies! We also had three bottles of red wine bought from Dakar courtesy of Abby…one was a Cote De Rhone so I really felt like I was back home in America. I don’t think I have ever eaten soo much at a Thanksgiving before..I had 2 full plates of food! I think I was just soo glad to get a break from eating rice for one day that I made sure to stuff my belly full with all that delicious food!!
Our Very Merry Senegalese Thanksgiving
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| Our Killed Turkey..cooked 2 perfection |
Well I hope everyone back home had just as wonderful and exciting of a Thanksgiving as I did! As good as my Thanksgiving was here, I truly missed all my family and friends back home! Since being here, have realized that it is the little things you miss the most like helping my Mom in the kitchen, going for a walk with my Dad and the dogs, Jane and Maggie, causing trouble with my brother and having a wonderful Thanksgiving meal with my Family…Auntie Lorna, Uncle Butch and Auntie Linda, Auntie Joan, Mom, Dad and Andrew, I missed you all this Thanksgiving!!
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| Before |
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| After |
A few more Photos from the month of November
ENJOY!
Baby Ida and Mom Njiaay
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| Our 2 regional house gaurd dogs!! |
Great blog jenn - loved the part about the turkey!
ReplyDeleteOmg Jenn that was hilarious about the turkey!! I'm so glad you enjoyed yourself! Miss and love you!! Xoxo
ReplyDelete