Dasain! ("Dah sine")

Happy Dasain! It is the middle of a 15-day festival here, the biggest one of the year, so families are getting together with relatives coming from as far away as America. On the eighth day of the festival, every family bought a goat for about $60 US and sacrificed it by cutting its head off with hopefully one blow of a kind of heavy knife (an "aussi" or whatever is the biggest chunk of metal you can find). Pretty much every part of the goat is saved for eating except the hair and skin, with the exception of the head, which is torched/BBQ'ed with the hair on. Due to the ease of cooking, the lungs are eaten as an appetizer, served in boiled goat blood. For the main course, my family and I finished off the rest of the respiratory system and connecting parts. We've had goat curry with our rice for the past 5 meals, and not all pieces of meat are equally enjoyable. Some of it just seems to be pure bone, and being that things are not very well lit at night, I'm sure I've downed some goat scalp, goat hair, bone bits, and odd parts of the digestive system at some point (yep, everything from esophagus to colon is eaten). It's really not all the bad. I only complain about the goat fat that solidifies all over your fingers since the Nepali spoon is nothing but your hand. Everybody washes it all off, but still.

Day 9 is fairly relaxed. If you have not built a massive swing by now, today is the day. Every village builds at least one swing (called "ping" - ironic for all u golfers). Depending on your resources, it consists of 4 huge bamboo poles set up fairly vertically and a crossbar bamboo pole to tie the rope to that makes the swing. From crossbar to ground is usually about 30 ft, so it may be said that they don't mess around. It's done by standing on the swing instead of sitting, which can make an American or any foreigner for that matter look fairly uncoordinated. There's really not much concern for safety in their minds, making me and them a lot alike. They often swing to about 90 degrees and sometimes with 2 people at a time. I saw an older lady give it a go. She was definitely older than sixty, but with no fear, she gave it an ambitious effort but lost control, gripping the rope as her heels smacked and dragged along the dirt. She kind of went unconscious for some moments, but she turned out alright.

Day 10 was sweet. It kind of felt like Christmas Eve the night before with Silina and Pramila chanting Bholi Dasain ("Tomorrow Dasain"), so waking up that morning had a lot of holiday excitement. The porch was being set up with sliced apples and bananas, roti/bread rings, pink rice (as you see in the picture) for giving tikkas on the forehead, money, jamara leaves, spitual water, and of course, more rice. Children receive tikkas from the adults in the family, receiving wishes and blessings for long life, good friends, great joy, and good health. They then get a money bill and some food and move on to the next house. Some children get very much into it, going to as many as fifty houses, so it kind of felt like a mix between Halloween and Christmas. I went to about five cause I was having too much fun at the Ping. At one point the grandfather put holy cow manure over my door and on a post in my room. It's still there.



P.S. - I am uploading more photos to my google account because it takes forever to load to my blog, and they can be viewed at http://picasaweb.google.com/Richard.Rigby.Jr.