Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Eid al Adha

Well, it's time for the first holiday break. Eid al Adha is one of the Muslim holidays celebrating the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as an act of obedience of God instead God provided a sheep for the sacrifice. This 3 day celebration begins on Friday. ADEC opted to give us Thursday and Sunday off.

So, now that you have background information I will tell you what happened. The week at school has been rather low-key. More students absent than normal. On Tuesday, about 6 girls in each class were gone. The girls were bringing in "gifts" actually, it was candy, candy and more candy. During the morning assembly, the girls were singing and older girls were bringing gifts for teachers and students. Gifts included a rolled paper that explained the 5 Pillars of Islam along with an explanation of Hajj, the Muslim trip to Mecca. Many of the gifts were bags of chocolate or individally wrapped chocolate. (Side note: the chocolate tastes different) We attempted to have a somewhat "normal" school day but with so many students absent that proved to be difficult. So we spent time reviewing, writing and coloring. The girls enjoyed that and also continued to try and teach me more Arabic. The girls think that is soo funny.

Then on Wednesday, NONE of them showed up. So, I spent time working on assessment data for my students and almost finished it all. We got to leave school early at 1pm after having a faculty meeting.

Here are pictures of the gifts given to me along with the girls' favorite candy, ChokiChoki which is chocolate paste.


 

1 comment:

  1. make one adjustment to the Eid background: it's a time of recollection and thanksgiving for provision of the lamb in place of Ishmael's sacrifice; therein lies the difference...same story, but they believe it was Ishmael, not Isaac.

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