Every family - no matter how poor they are - gets a ram, which can be quite expensive at this time of the year so they save money for a while. Here is our ram that I called Dinner. Dinner was a rather handsome ram. Unfortunately the fate of the ram during Tobaski festival is unpleasant.
It is very interesting for me just how cold-hearted and cruel I became in this 1.5 year. I don't think I would've been able to handle this scene just a while ago. And here I am, taking pictures of cold-blood murder. But I have to admit - even now - it was rather hard. I nearly cried and of course everybody was laughing at me...
In the morning after the prayers and visiting mosque, my brothers and my mother cut up the meat and divided it between two parts of our family. Children get internal organs like heart and lungs. Liver is fried immediately and shared by everybody as it is a delicacy. Stomach (trebuha) and other internal organs (kishki vsyakie) are saved for the second day of the festival. They are cooked in oil and served over steamed millet - a very nutritious grain.
So this is Sira crocheting (what is it? a tract of some kind? something from inside the ram - kishki!) into a pretty braid.
Watch this video of how she does it! Pretty cool. I have to admit it tasted like rubber but it was still a fun experience.
This is for the crowd of about 10 people, 5 of whom are young men... Looks like a lot, but disappears in about 5 minutes...
My contribution for the festival was panketos-donuts-pyshki and fishpie - meat pies - pirozhki in Wolof-English-Russia respectively.
I am getting pretty good at those things! Maybe one day I can qualify as a good Gambian housewife. Although I doubt it as I cannot carry a 25 liter pan of water on my head and baby on my back at the same time as my hand are busy holding tight the 2-year old who is trying to escape and roll in the dust...
We made pies and fried them...
Notice the pies in the far right corner? Now notice the baby in the bottom left corner? That is Baby-I, she is taking a bath! Just quiet recently she started standing up in her "bath tub" and toppling over. So now we have to watch her all the time. It gets tiring after a while. She is growing too fast!
So after we finished, we had this big bowl filled with donuts and pies. And it was gone in about 5 minutes... That's the negative aspect of the large family for you!
Men put their best kaftaans and go pray before lunch.
Children put on their best dresses and sit around brewing attaya - green tea, a have an entry somewhere on it, search the blog if you want.
Baby-I and her mother Amie were splendid as usual. Amie is very fashionable and she keeps her children looking good at all costs. She is my best friend in the village. Fluent English, studied computers, smart and charming - shame she is in the village. But the job market sucks in this country. She cannot find a job. It is pretty sad.
My host-father Mabel, resplendent in his white kaftaan, sitting at the meeting of elders. I was allowed to take pictures for 5 seconds and then kicked out. :)
Funny hair. The girls go all the way to make their hair nice. Amie spend the better part of the morning braiding village's fashion ladies.
And at night we all go around each other compounds in our nice dresses, with beautiful hair, after the whole day of eating good food and having general fun. Look at each other's clothes, discuss latest fashions, taste attaya and panketoes and of course ask for salibu. Salibu means you have to give money to anyone who asks. If you want of course. It is a tradition that helped with a fair distribution of wealth. Now it is like trick-a-treating but with coins instead of candy. Fun, fun, fun...
Schastlivogo Novogo Goda!
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