Passion [for Morocco] Blogs This Moroccan Life, Part II

I left you last time with a plate of steaming couscous. Bsaha raha! To your health and
enjoy! I will show you the second third of my year in Morocco in this entry.
I would like to present you first with Eid al Adha, the biggest and most important holiday
in Islam. It it the holiday that directly follows Ramadan, the month of fasting. Eid is the
symbolic, final breaking of the fast. Each family who can afford to do so buys a sheep
and sacrifices it. Not an inch of the sheep is wasted, and one third is given to the poor,
one third is given to family and friends, and one third is kept for the family themselves.
I am a vegetarian, and remained so all year (with occasional compromises of fish to
appease my hosts), but I was actually not as deeply disturbed by the sacrificial tradition
as I thought I would be. The way in which the sheep are killed during Eid is far more
humane than the way we eat meat in the United States.
Eid is a time of giving and sharing and gathering together. This was the first time I felt
very close with my extended host family. I ran the streets with my little host cousins,
running from neighbor to neighbor within the medina to wish them a happy Eid, or Eid
Mubarak. We all wore our traditional Moroccan clothing, djellabas for women and men,
and fokiyas for men.

Here I am holding my baby host brother, Ziyad, watching the festivities take place.

Here I am running around the medina with some good friends, visiting other good
friends.

Next, I would like to share the memory of my eighteenth birthday which I was fortunate
enough to have spent in the company of my beloved host family and friends in Morocco.
I helped plan the party which included fancy attire, a feast of roasted fish, rice,
vegetables, salad, and baguette, lots of Arabic music and dancing, laughing, talking, and a
double decker ice cream birthday cake!

Here is the feast and some of the family!

Here is the beautiful birthday itself! I blew out the candles just before midnight struck.
I attended a French high school in Rabat. I was one of eight Americans (all were
members of my program), the rest of the students were Moroccans. Morocco was
colonized by the French, so most Moroccans speak at least a bit of French, and many
speak it fluently.
The French system of education is very different from the American system. My school
included students from eighth grade up until senior year of high school, but was very
small with less than one hundred students total.
Classes were lecture-based, and small. The students stayed in the same classroom while
the teachers rotated. After ninth grade the students choose one of three tracks; business,
economics, or science. I chose the economics track and took philosophy, history,
geography, French literature, economics, and political science. My fellow American peers
disliked this way of school for the most part, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and made many
friends and developed strong relationships with the professors.

Here is the school from the outside.

This is my philosophy class. We were discussing Plato's cave theory. Notice the plain
walls and the small size of the classroom.
This concludes Part II of three! Tune in next time!