Ramadan is upon us once again, dear readers. The month where Muslims must fast from dawn until sunset every day - no eating or drinking. We've talked a bit about it before (here and here.) It's been so long and I haven't talked about it at all, but we're already more than halfway through the month of Ramadan. Eid - the big celebration that comes the day after the month of Ramadan ends - is September 10th this year.
These day, Ramadan means that we wake up before dawn to have breakfast. We have to finish eating by around 5am. Then we don't eat again until sunset, which is around 8pm. The timings are determined by the sun & moon, so each day the breakfast times creeps later and later by a minute or two while the sunset meal creeps earlier and earlier in the same fashion.
Refraining from food all day is difficult; it's meant to be. It's even more difficult after you have kids and all three of their meals plus any snacks must be prepared by you while you can't have any of it. Today the smell of strawberries at lunch time was my own personal jihad.
The most difficult thing, though, is Tarawih prayers. During the month of Ramadan, we also go to the mosque or other local gathering place to perform extra night-time prayers. At these prayers, people standing in long, orderly rows (well, sometimes orderly) and listen to the prayer leader recite the Qu'ran, verse by verse, until it's finished by the end of the month. These days, that means leaving the house by 9:00 at night and not getting home until 11:30, and standing (and kneeling and then bending all the way to the ground so that only your toes, knees, hands and forehead are touching the ground) for more than two hours, and doing the stand-bend-faceplant cycle at least 29 times. It's a complicated and physically tiring process. Luckily our local Islamic center has a guy to lead prayers whose voice is indescribeably beautiful, so it's also very spiritually uplifting and totally worth it even though it's so taxing. Some days, though, one or more of us is just not able to make it. 11:30 pm is too late to take the baby out anyway, so someone has to stay home with him anyway. We live close enough to the center that sometimes M goes for the first half and I go for the second half. Sometimes my sister-in-law stays home and then I'm able to go and leave the baby in good hands. (Well, leave the baby monitor in good hands at least - his bedtime is way before that!) Many days I just stay at home and listen to it online. M volunteers a bit at our local Islamic Center and he's helped set up a webcam and streaming video system so that community members who can't attend can still see the congregation and listen to the recitation.
One of the other aspects of Ramadan has nothing to do with religion. It's also a very social month. I actually have no idea what this means in Pakistan - I've never experienced Ramadan there. I only know what it's like in the American expat community that we're a part of. For us, it means that we invite people to our house a few times during the month for an Iftar party. Iftar is the name of the appetizer-y meal eaten at sunset, and we invite our friends and/or family over to share it with us. We also used to invite our non-Muslim friends for an Iftar party, but since the sunset time is getting later and later every year, we stopped doing that last year. I can't imagine many Americans wanting to come to my house and not start eating dinner until after 8 o'clock at night! Most of my American friends eat dinner at 6pm, 7 at the latest, and some even earlier than that! Unfortunately, with the Ramadan timings changing every year, it will be more than 15 years before the sunset is earlier than 8pm during the month of Ramadan.
This year has been especially social for us. We've hosted two iftar parties for two separate groups of our friends, and we've been invited to so many others that we've not been home for iftar any night during the weekends except last night. Last weekend we were invited at a coworker of M's on Friday night, then drove two hours to a nearby cousin's house for Saturday's evening iftar. We stayed overnight, playing games and chatting and eating some more (after Tarawih prayers, of course) until dawn and then drove back home. It was a great plan! This upcoming weekend we're invited at a another friend's house on Friday and then we're going to the mosque for an iftar they provide on Saturday. Next weekend, we're hosting an iftar for Chachoo's school friends. It will be his wife's first large dinner party thrown by her. I'll just be backup cook/cleaner, like she usually is for me.
And you all know I'll be roaming around with my camera too!
