Coming Home/ Eid el-Adha

Coming Home

Seth and I are coming home this Saturday Dec. 6th. Seth’s dad is having major surgery in Indianapolis, IN on the 8th and we wanted to be there with him. We’ll be spending most of our time in Indianapolis but will come down to Kansas City at some point depending on how well Mr. Spurlock is doing. We were lucky that this upcoming week is Eid El Adha and then we start winter break on the 19th. So we get to be home for a month with only missing 7 days of school. We’ll be returning to Egypt on Jan. 1st.

We are really excited to come home, especially for Christmas although we wish it was for better circumstances. We can’t wait to see our dog Desiree as well as our family and friends. Plus we have a list of food that we miss and can’t wait to sink our teeth into. On the top of that list is a nice big glass of ice cold real milk, Mom’s pumpkin bread and cranberry tea. We’ll also have to make a stop at Chipotle, Panera Bread Company, and Cold Stone Creamery. We are also looking forward to going out to a bar and getting to order alcohol. Surprisingly, neither one of us is missing driving, although it will be nice to be able to get in a car and not pray that you’ll arrive at your destination alive every time. It’ll seem almost weird to be in a country with traffic rules.

Although we are looking forward to coming home, at the same we are disappointed that we are not staying here. We are going to miss out on several school/staff activities that we were looking forward too as well as the traveling we had previously planed for over the breaks. We were going to take a cruise down the Nile River, see Luxor and Aswan as well as spend New Years Eve at the pyramids. I’m sure we’ll be able to some other time though.




As I mentioned earlier, Eid El Adha starts next week. It means the Feast of Sacrifice and takes place approximately seventy days after the Eid el-Fitr (the feast after Ramadan). The Eid el-Adah coincides with the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca; the culmination of the pilgrimage, the Day of Afaft, is the day before the Eid. This is when the pilgrims spend the day in prayer and devotion on Mt. Arafat, where the Prophet Mohammed delivered his last sermon.

The Eid el-Adha is a celebration of the obedience to God shown by the Prophet Ibrahim because he was ready to sacrifice his firstborn son when asked. Ibrahim was rewarded for being a true believer when a sheep appeared in the place of Ismail, and it was sacrificed instead. For this reason, Muslims slaughter either a sheep, or if they are able to afford it, a cow, to commemorate Ibrahim's trust in God. People have been buying their sheep or cows for the past week or two and fattening them up, they keep them tied up on the street outside their door, or just in the alleyways with someone watching them. I’ve even seen a couple on balconies. So it’s been interesting walking around town the past couple of days, and we saw even more when we were in Rosetta last weekend. It’s sometimes comical every once in awhile when one will escape and seeing people chase after it. People have arrangements with butchers to butcher them before the Eid but sometimes they do it themselves. We keep on being told how horrible that butchering day is and how all the streets are flowing red with blood. We’ve been told we want to get out of town or stay inside and not even open a window that day it’s so disgusting; so I’m glad we’ll be gone. With the meat, they keep 1/3 of it, another 1/3 has to go to relatives, and the last 1/3 has to go to the poor. If they are rich they will usually just buy two animals and give the second to the poor. So during this time, Mosques are filled with meat for the poor.

There is a special dawn prayer on the morning of the first day of the Eid. So if we were staying here we’d hear on the loud speakers from the five mosques we live by; the congregation reciting over and over again: "Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, la illah il Allah" (God is great, God is great. There is no god but God).