Gurban Bayram

One of the big holidays in the Muslim faith was today. Technically it’s today, tomorrow, and the next day; it’s a three-day-er and it was quite the event around here. I don’t know what it’s called worldwide, but the Turkmen call it Gurban Bayram. It literally translates to “sacrifice holiday” and just so you know, the name is pretty descriptive of what goes on for three days. Lots and lottttts of sacrificing. Mainly sheep.
This morning, we all got up extra early to get our sheep-killin freak on. Everywhere you looked in the village, it reeked of barnyard mortalities. There were deceased sheep hanging from posts, slowly draining their blood into a bucket below. There were sheep still alive that were tied to stakes while men stood next to them sharpening knives. There were even cars driving around with their trunks filled with sheep for sale who were drugged up and ready to be slaughtered at a moment’s notice. For some reason a lot of the sheep had colorful butts. Like they were literally spray-painted in jewel tones. There were purple-butted sheep, ruby red-butted sheep, turquoise-butted sheep, even a few with emerald. If they all stood together it could have strongly resembled a gay-pride parade. But I digress.

So there’s death everywhere I look, and then my host father and brother arrive home and remove from their car trunk a purple butt and an emerald butt. As well as the sheep attached to them. I guess I never really thought about it, but sacrificing an animal is really kind of an intense task. Sheep aren’t little, at least these ones weren’t. Each of them was about the size of a Saint Bernard, and they were fully conscious and baa-ing, and making a general ruckus. My dad went first. He dug a little hole in the ground for the sheep’s blood to drain into, then he drug the sheep (who had all four of its feet tied together) over to the hole and placed its neck over the top of it.

He took a regular kitchen knife (it wasn’t even that big) and cut the sheep just a little bit, directly on its jugular vein. All of this blood came whooshing out, and it was incredibly noisy. It sounded like when you can hear water running through the pipes in your house, and the blood just kept coming. As the sheep lost blood and stopped fussing so much, my dad cut further into the neck, slicing through muscle and cartilage. It was particularly fascinating when he cut the trachea. The sheep was still alive, albeit unconscious, and as a result it was still breathing. When he cut the trachea it kept breathing, and it made the most horrendous noise. Kind of like slurping soup, or maybe trying to breathe through a really really stuffy nose.

Do you know what happens if you take the lid off of a 2-liter bottle of soda, and turn it directly upside-down? Soda begins to pour out, and the sides of the bottle are suctioned in as the liquid drains out. At some point, the flow of the soda slows because the volume is depleted so much, and the bottle sides can’t suction in any further. To equalize, air rushes in and refills the space vacated by the drained soda so that the rest of the remaining soda can drain out. Are you following how this would apply to sheep-sacrificing physics? I suddenly hear an awful gurgling noise and the blood coming out of the sheep’s jugular suddenly stops flowing. There’s a lot of noise and a split second where nothing seems to be happening, then just as suddenly the blood starts flowing even faster. Absolutely fascinating. I figured they just died right away and that was it. Guess not.

Especially icky (besides the sheep emptying its bowels upon death) was the cutting of the spine. We’re talking big vertebrae. Like really thick, and the only thing the man had to work with was a standard kitchen knife. Every time he touched the knife to the spine, the whole sheep would jerk and wiggle as if it were not only alive, but also still conscious. This kept freaking my host-father out, so he would take the knife tip away from the spine, and the spasming would stop. You’d figure the sheep’s nervous system would be done for, seeing as it had almost no blood in its body, but I guess some physical processes take longer than others to cease functioning. Anyways, he finally had to just hack through one of the discs in between vertebrae with this shitty dull knife, and the whole time he did it, the entire sheep was jerking and flailing around like it was trying to get away from him. It was creepy, and if I hadn’t seen him cut the sheep’s jugular more than 15 minutes before, I would have been certain the sheep was still awake.

This was the point where the rain started to come down in significant quantities. That, coupled with the rising stench from the sheep body, made it no longer worth it to me to stay outside, so I headed back in and went about cleaning my room and packing to leave for Ashgabat the following day. A few hours later, I walked into our living room, and was accosted by a huge cloth laid on the floor, filled with sheep parts. Like legs and stuff. All of the organs were in a big bowl (a really big bowl, more like a cauldron) and normally I would have been grossed out enough to turn around and retreat to my room, but I was feeling pretty feisty, so I recruited one of my sisters, and we played name-that-organ for the better part of an hour. I got to look inside of the sheep’s stomach (did you know it has ridges, like an accordion file, so that it can expand?) and I got to play with lungs and kidney and liver and heart, and something that looked like a turd, but I think it was a gallbladder. It was great.

So then my sister tells me she needs me to help her out with a sheep-related job and I’m like “Sure, bring it on!” Famous last words. At this point it was still pouring rain outside, and it was a really cold rain. Not to sound like a wimp, but it wasn’t really weather I wanted to be outside in. So we had to go outside and clean sheep intestines. I’m not sure how familiar you are with what intestines look like when they come out of the sheep, but they’re basically a big wad of intestiney-ness, encased in fat. There’s all of this connective tissue that keeps the intestines and fat in a compact unit, and in order to clean it, you have to follow the intestine along, like a tangled piece of thread, and keep ripping it free of all of the fascia and fat that it’s attached to. It makes this really distinct tearing sound. Kind of what you would imagine Velcro would sound like under-water. After we had detangled two sheep’s worth of intestinal tracts, it was time to de-crap-ifiy them. We had to rip them into foot-long sections (another great noise and sensation, intestines are much more elastic than you would imagine), then take a stick and shove it through each section of intestine to move all of the fecal material out of it. The intestines have some sort of fatty tissue lining their insides, and the knobs on the stick kept getting stuck on it as you tried to remove the stick from the intestine. As a result, most of the intestines wound up getting turned inside out as we tried to detangle the stick from the fat.

Please don’t forget that not only is it raining heavily and my fingers are completely numb from the cold, but to make matters even more special there is this thick mud sucking at our feet as we squat there squeegee-ing sheep crap onto the ground. Definitely one of my finer moments in Turkmenistan.

So after an hour of being in the rain with the sheep guts, they are finally cleaned out and ready to do something. Whatever it is that you do with sheep guts. I guess I hadn’t really thought about that. Until we took them into our kitchen and started cutting them into sections. That’s right. For dinner I had sheep-guts soup. And it was awesome. And that’s how I spent today, just in case you were wondering.