Leid Mqur...

Explaining Leid Mqur to Americans is as difficult as explaining Christmas or Thanksgiving to Moroccans. I don't know much about Leid except that it is one of the biggest religious holidays for Moroccans. A big focus of the holiday is charity and of course, getting together with family. The charity ususally consists in giving those less forntunate some of the sheep that has been slaughtered. Every family, with the means to do so, is expected to slaughter a sheep on Leid. They cannot, however, slaughter it until the king hs slaughtered his own sheep. The head of each family slaughters a sheep and then proceeds to skin it and dissect it. There is a certain order in which the sheep is eaten. In my town eat the liver, heart, pancreas and intestines on the first day. Most of these are eaten on skewers. One such delicacy is heart wrapped in tummy fat skewers. Yum! Some of the photos below show my host dad slaughtering the sheep for our family (you can also see some of the women preparing the organs for consumption just as they come out of the sheep).
The pictures with the boujlood (guys wearing sheep skins) may be very specific to this town. I know only of one other town near Marrakech that does this. The night of Leid a bunch of young guys wear donated sheep skins and parade around town asking for monetary donations. Notice that those skins were on the sheep only a few hours prior to this parade. They do this procession (while beating drums) for a coupe of nights in a row. It really is quite interesting to partake in.
This Leid, like the one at the end of Ramadan; requires that people visit their neighbors and friends. I made the usual rounds and drank tons of really sweet tea and ate bunches of sweets. Lucky that I am vegetarian because I got to skip all the skewers at every house that I went to. Can't wait for Leid next year :)

keyboard isnt working... will write about leid later
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Utfl

Its snowing! I can't feel my toes haha. We had our first big snow the day before thanksgiving, but that snow melted within a day. Monday's snow is still here! Yesterday I walked around on roofs observing what everyone in town was busy with. Now that it finally stopped snowing our poor mud roofs are laden with snow and in some cases are leaking as well. Everyone has been up on their roofs shoveling snow. My town looks quite beatiful right now, but its rather cold for someone that has lived in southern california her whole life :)







Im standing on my sitemates roof surveying the snowfall.

My sitemate in my my muddy alley. Earlier in the day everything was pretty and white and now as the snow is shoveled and starts melting, we just have a muddy slippery alley.

Utfl! (snow)

I'm actually standing on a roof while taking this photo. And so are those guys. They are shoveling the snow off their houses to stop leaking in some cases or possible caving in of the roof.