Ramadan, Day 1

13 August

Coming back to site from Agadir (short weekend after two weeks of PPST training in Ouarzazate), transportation was becoming difficult.  We traveled on Monday, Ramadan about to begin on Thursday, and already every stop the bus would make was like an incitement to riot.  Happy to be back in site before that madness peaked.

And then…not with a bang, but a whimper.  I stayed up very late on Wednesday hoping to sleep as late as possible into Thursday, knowing there wouldn’t be any breakfast or lunch.  (I’m still with my host family, by the way, of course the new house was not finished before Ramadan and probably next-to-nothing will happen with it over the next month now.  This was my biggest fear and was also completely inevitable.) Stepping out of my room into this strange new world that we’ve been preparing for since we first got here, all I could notice was how strangely quiet it was.  No kids playing in the street, no sound of work or activity coming from anywhere.  It felt like a bomb had gone off in the stratosphere—people were just lying on the ground wherever they happen the fall, conserving energy.  No work to be done and no fuel to do it with.  People shuffled around like zombies when they moved at all.

Around noon, my sister insisted on making me a light brunch of eggs and tea, despite my repeated insistence not too.  I didn’t plan to fast and my family knew this, but I certainly didn’t intend to have them cooking for me while they were fasting.  I had just received a big CARE package full snacks and goodies from my mom that would keep me from starving to death for a few weeks, and I was perfectly content to just nibble on that stuff ‘til dark.  Then again, if the young kids who normally live here (they’re away on summer visits right now) were around, they wouldn’t be fasting either and my sisters would be cooking for them, so I can justify it that way.

We broke fast around 7:45 with fresh local dates (from our own fields), askif (soup), and aghom n zit (a donut-like fried bread that you dip in honey—delicious), and got full to bursting just on those.  The usual dinner followed a couple hours later, but I was still completely full from “breakfast.”  The rest of my family woke up again around 3:30 in the morning to have another meal as close as possible to the start of the next fast.  It’s going to be an interesting month.