Feast!

Hello! I believe I mentioned in my last blog that I would soon be posting an update about what happened during the days of feast that followed Ramazan. Well, that was months ago! Better late than never, here I am to report to you my not so clear memories of these days.


The time of Ramazan went by quickly! In fact, the last 10 days were extra fun. They believe that an angel comes and visits them during one night of these last ten. They don’t know which night exactly so, some people stay up every night until the morning call to prayer to pray and read their book, so that the angel would be happy when it visited. So, usually I would stay up too. We’d end up not going to bed until 4 and then sleeping in until 11. Also what was fun during Ramazan is that I got to be the official taste-tester! I only fasted a few of the days with them, and when I wasn’t fasting I did my best not to eat in front of them. However, when Harseen was cooking and preparing for the evening meal, she couldn’t taste things to see if they needed salt, etc. so she’d always beg me to taste it for her so she knew if she needed to add anything! I liked this job. :)



The first morning after Ramazan, we woke up early and cooked (I’m not included in the “we” part of “cooked”) a huge dinner with lots of rice, soup, chicken, etc.! I like eating cold pizza for breakfast, but I think this is the first time I ate a full all-out meal so early in the morning. It was a fun and joyous occasion, for sure. Harseen’s brother’s family was there too, so the nieces added extra fun. Oh, I missed something that happened even before we woke up to eat. I think at about 5am, Harseen woke me up to sit out on the porch for a few minutes to listen to what was coming across the loud speakers from the mosques. A man was singing absolutely beautiful music for two hours to celebrate the ending of Ramazan. I enjoyed about 5 mintues of it, and then went back to bed.





After we ate, the men of the household set out to visit as many other households as they could. I don’t think they stayed long at each house, but they did stay long enough to get a piece of candy. During the morning, Harseen’s dad stopped in a few times to empty his pockets of candy. I think before noon he made it to over 35 houses! Over the next few days, everyone, not just the men, went to visit friends and family. It seemed kind of like a game to me. They didn’t call before they went, so they just showed up at houses, hoping someone would be home. However, everyone else was out doing this too! So they sometimes had to go to a couple houses before they found someone to visit. If someone wasn’t home, they had to leave a note saying they stopped in. This way, no one could say to them, “You didn’t even visit me during feast!” Also, from what I understood, these days of feast were the time where you were to ask forgiveness of anyone you had offended throughout the year. I had mixed feelings about this idea, because, on the one hand, shouldn’t you ask someone’s forgiveness as soon as you realize your fault, and not save it until the end of the year? But, on the other hand, it’s nice to have a specified time for that, sort of a way of accountability to think about who you need to ask forgiveness from. So, I decided it’s not such a bad idea!



Here's some of Taib's surviving candy he collected.


Another tradition during this time is to give money to all the children. So, of course Harseen’s nieces got money from their parents and grandparents. They were so proud of this and kept counting it and showing it to me. I’m not sure how I, at 29, am also considered a child, but Harseen and Taib, her mom, and her dad all gave me money too! I didn’t want to accept it, but I know they really wanted to give it to me. I felt so special to be included in the family and in the tradition, even if I wasn’t exactly a child! Maybe because my level of Kurdish is like a two or three year old’s, they forget that I’m actually an adult.  Speaking of money, this is also the time of year where the head of the household has to pay a certain amount of money to help the poor people. This amount is determined by how many people are in that household. I felt very honored, when I found out I was counted in on this one, and Taib paid as if I were his real daughter!



Well, now that these feast days are long past, we actually have another feast coming up in about a week called Jezhne Korban. I think this is a feast celebrating Abraham’s substitution sacrifice of the lamb according to their beliefs. However, I’m not promising I’ll write a blog entry on how this feast goes, because, as you can see I’m so late with reports on the last feast.



To give you a little update on how things are going for me here personally, I’m really enjoying my time! I have a great group of classes right now, and each of them are so fun to teach. I’m very busy, so that makes my time fly by so quickly. As much as I am looking forward to arriving home in about 5 weeks, I want to really be able to enjoy my time I have here instead of always feeling so busy. Also, if you’ve heard some of the recent news happening in this country, don’t worry about me. Things are still really safe up here in this city, and I’m feeling a lot of peace and contentment in being here even if things are quite unstable in the south.



Well, if you made it through to the end of this entry, you should get a prize! Thanks for reading. Actually if you made it this far, you CAN get a prize. A little trivia: If you can tell me the name of Iraq’s president without looking it up, I’ll bring you back something small from Iraq. :) No cheating! Or if you can tell me the name of Kurdistan’s president, I’ll count that too. Hey, I’ll even count the prime minister, if you know that!

One more picture to finish. I put this on FB a while ago, but I think it's a fun picture. :)


Switched!