Happy Easter and Melkom Fasika!

I don’t normally eat meat at 7am.  I’m not normally even awake at 7am.  However, this is just one difference between American Easter and Ethiopian Easter, which they call Fasika.  To start with, you should clear your mind of pastel colors, sugary candy, and bunnies carrying baskets of colorful eggs (by the way, thank you America for having the weirdest traditions ever, it makes explaining American Easter so simple).  As I have mentioned previously, Ethiopians have a completely different calendar system, so they celebrated Easter a week after the rest of the world.  Fasika is probably the biggest holiday celebrated here, comparable to the American Christmas celebration and hype (well, who am I kidding, nothing even compares to the Christmas hype in America).  Good Friday was a national holiday and even before Friday, people started traveling to their hometowns to be with their families.  In the Orthodox religion, they fast from all animal products for 55 days before Easter, so building up to the big celebration, the animal section of the market began to grow massively.  Walking down the streets on any Monday, Thursday or Saturday you were bound to see proud new owners of sheep and goats leading their purchase home on a rope leash.

Starting with that 7am knock on my door, I will walk you through my very fascinating Fasika experience.  It took a few minutes I am sure for me to realize the knock, knock, knock was on my door.  I rolled over, noticed the time, knew it was Sunday, and almost went back to sleep.  Then I remembered that it was Fasika, and knew it was time to start my culture-filled day.  I opened the door to find Eyerus, the 7-year-old daughter of my landlord, telling me in Amharic that is was time to come eat.  The night before I had seen my landlord kill a chicken, which his wife along with the two worker-girls began cooking.   Around midnight many Orthodox go to church service that lasts until 4am.  After the Easter service, the fast is over and it is time to eat meat!  I found out that I was lucky they waited until 7am to wake me, as they started eating at 5am!  I sat with my landlord and his family and ate a healthy serving of duro wat, chicken stew, with injera of course.  After I finished eating I had some time to rest, I thought, before I had to make my first appointment for the day.  Leading up to Easter most of the people I have befriended in Dangila insisted that I come to celebrate Easter with their family.  Everyone was so welcoming and I felt so blessed for the invitations.  I decided to celebrate with four different families, and everyone who asked after that, since they wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, made an appointment with me to join them for a meal later in the week.

Well, after I ate duro wat I headed back into my house to rest when I heard the sharpening of knives coming from the back yard.  It didn’t even faze me for a couple minutes, and then I realized that they must be preparing to slaughter the sheep! I’m not one for guts and gore, but I am one for new experiences, and seeing a sheep slaughtered on Fasika is like decorating a tree for Christmas, necessary.  Little did I know that this wouldn’t be the only sheep slaughtering I would witness for Fasika.  It was around 7:30am when the episode began, and I watched my landlord and his 12-year-old son as they dissected the animal that my dog had been chasing for a week before.  It was more of an anatomy lesson than I ever received in high school.  While I decided that pictures of such an event were not necessary, Eyerus begged me to use my camera until I gave in.

9:05am I began walking to my favorite restaurant across from my office where the owner, Tizda, invited me to celebrate with her family.  I arrived a little late, but punctuality is often overlooked in this country, so it was not a problem.  In fact, it was 9:45am before the first cup of bunna, coffee, from the ceremony was poured.  Bunna qurs, a snack food that goes along with the bunna ceremony, today was injera spread with a mixture of butter and berbery (spicy crushed peppers).  I learned that this was a traditional bunna qurs for Easter because butter is an animal product, which could not be eaten during fasting.  Sometime after arriving, they served me a plate full of duro wat and I happily ate as I observed the festivities of the family surrounding me.  It was 10am when one of the brothers led a sheep by a rope collar into the restaurant area where we were all seated.  I thought maybe they were showing off the sheep to the family before taking it around back to slaughter; I was wrong.  Ten minutes of wondering later, they began slaughtering the sheep in the room where we were all sitting.  Needless to say, I won’t feel awkward ever again about simply bringing my dog inside when I stop by to buy bread! After killing the sheep, they first cut out the tongue.  I realize this is gross, but I witnessed it, so you can read about it.  I watched the elderly mother of the family cut up the tongue meat and hand feed it to everyone in the room as a sign of respect.  When she offered it to me I politely declined, saying that I do not eat raw meat; about ten minutes later she came over to me with a piece cooked especially for me and I couldn’t turn down her thoughtful gesture.  After the final two rounds of the coffee ceremony, they insisted that I stay to eat some of the freshly prepared sheep meat, and it was around 11:45am when I returned to my house.

Just as I sat down to take a deep breath and literally digest my morning, my landlord knocked on my door and invited me inside.  Every household prepares coffee and a meat stew for Easter and then you invite neighbors over to celebrate and eat, so each house I went to there were also many other friends and family cycling in and out of the house.  It was noon when I took a seat in Ato Belacho’s house and was served bunna qurs, and for the next hour, I socialized, drank three cups of coffee, and ate sheep wat.

 I had just one hour to allow myself to rest before walking to my next appointment for the day at 2pm.  The Head of the Bank, whom I have gotten to know over the past two months, invites me over just about every weekend to socialize with his family, so I could not decline the Easter invitation.   I spent an hour there where I ate bunna qurs, duro wat, and drank two cups of coffee before excusing myself to head to their neighbor’s house.

3pm I met my friends Getameh and Manny where they fed me sheep wat and a couple rounds of coffee.  Ethiopians are very forceful when it comes to eating, and “no” is not really listened to when the ladles of food are being scooped onto your plate.  This was a fact I overlooked when booking the four appointments for the day.  It was 5pm when I waddled home, filled to the brim with meat and coffee.

6:30pm my landlord offered me some sheep, and I said that I was way too full.  He then corrected his statement, asking if I wanted some of the sheep meat to cook myself.  In broken Amharic, I still turned down the offer, not even able to imagine a time in the future where hunger would be an option.  A few minutes later, his middle son, 9-year-old Yenebeb, knocked on my door with a container of sheep meat. Like I said, “no” is often ignored.  I thanked him for the gift, re-packaged the meat into a Tupperware and took it to store in Ato Belacho’s fridge I use on occasion.  I am blessed to have such caring neighbors surrounding me!

All in all, I had the experience I wanted.  I have successfully experienced Fasika for all it’s worth!  Many people continue the celebration all week though, not returning to work.  Neighbors I have learned take turns hosting dinners and lunches throughout this week, and I have already set up two lunches and two dinners for various days. Many times in fact, it is not so much of an invitation to eat, as it is a knock on my door and the imperative statement, “eat!”