I am now half-way into my first experience of the holy month of Ramadan. Though I am not actually fasting myself, when I work in the field I am obliged to be very discrete about eating or drinking. Usually I don’t eat at all, and in order to drink I have to find a corner to hide in (the car) and secretly slurp water. Not eating is not too difficult in this heat, but not drinking makes you feel thoroughly terrible. My staff told me that for the first few days they have bad headaches, but then their bodies adapt. I haven’t yet done a full Ramadan-day-fast. I guess I should try it. It may help me understand what everyone is going through.
I find myself really attracted to the rhythm of praying. It is not particularly the relationship with God that attracts me; it is more the discipline of the daily rituals that I find appealing. Everything stops for prayer time – we have to organise workshops so that they finish in time for 3 o’clock prayer, and during Ramadan that means the working day is pretty much over. The rest of the day is devoted to praying, resting, and then feasting.
The day begins at about 5, in order to eat before the sun comes up. I became aware of this routine early on in Ramadan, when I awoke at 5ish to the sound of a mob of children on the street, banging pots and pans and shouting loudly. I had no idea what was going on. I listened, in the darkness, and I started to panic. There were lots of very over-excited children just outside my window, with threatening sounding kitchen utensils, and from what I could make out they were shouting “Huwaji, go home, huwaji, go home”. (huwaji meaning foreigner). Oh my god, I thought, this is going to be the most embarrassing security incident yet - I’m going to be attacked by twenty hyper eight year olds. I leapt out of bed, quickly put my shoes on (I had been advised to always sleep with something decent on, just in case) and ran outside into the courtyard to ask the guard what was going on. The children were just on the other side of the wall. The guard laughed and told me that all was ‘tamam’, that all was OK. He reassured me. Soon the children moved on, to go and scare another sleeping foreigner no doubt, and I eventually went back to bed.
The incident played on my mind a bit, and I didn’t understand what had happened until two days later when the guard came into the office and asked for someone to translate for him. Through the translator he explained that the children had been chanting “huwaji gaum” meaning, “foreigner wake up”, which is by all accounts a very friendly thing to do, during Ramadan. The children go through the streets to wake everyone up, so that people get a chance to eat before fasting begins. I suppose they think I’m fasting too, and they just wanted to help. They haven’t been back since then, but there’s generally so much movement on the street, and blaring of mosques at that hour, that I wake up anyway.
