Slaughter and Waste

A neighbor re-oils a ram during the slow roasting process.
Other rams cook beside the fire behind him.

We just came through one of the biggest festivals of the year here, in which a ram is slaughtered for every adult member of the household, if you have to resources to do it. It’s a lot like the day of atonement from the Hebrew tradition, but it’s rooted in a story of Abraham almost sacrificing his son Ishmael. While we don’t have the chance to see the mosque or prayer side of the festival, which is supposed to be about transferring away and paying for sin, we do see the joyful and unfortunately wasteful side of it in the streets. It’s amazing to see how many sheep are slaughtered on this one day, when most of the rest of the year the majority of families can’t even afford to buy meat to eat. Then on this one day you’ll see 3, 4, 5, or maybe 8 rams roasting on X shaped frames around a bonfire outside some houses. On the positive side, you are supposed to share a third of the meat with the poor, and it’s common to share a fair amount with your neighbors as well. Still everyone freely admits that they don’t do any work for the next few days because they stuffed themselves too full with meat (most don’t have refrigerators to store left-overs), and then they have digestion problems from not being used to eating it as well.

All the kids watching the rams being slaughtered
and skinned/cleaned - note the fancy clothes!

While at first it really frustrates me to see all the waste, it doesn’t take too much reflection to see that this is very similar in some ways to festival/holidays in the States. People wait till one (or maybe two) days a year to buy a bunch of food (even if they can’t afford it), invite lots of people over, and then sit around stuffing themselves until they don’t feel too well. We also have seen families in our neighborhood buy special outfits and other treats that they probably can’t afford in order to celebrate. This starts to sound too familiar… As I reflect more on it, I don’t want to be too negative about these times because it really is important to have a space to celebrate the blessings we’ve received, to share resources, to enjoy using resources in a way that provides for others. But these things often get lost in our human confusion between celebrating something good and seeking our own self-gratification to enjoy and consume too much. It’s humbling as I watch from the outside and remember how easily we tend to lose sight of what exactly it is that we’re celebrating.