Eid

Shuvo and his family had 1/4 share in this bull

I was with my former host family outside Bogra for Eid.  I was happy to join the group sitting a bit away from where the animals were killed, but then for the first time helped cut up meat.  (The job doesn't require a whole lot of skill: it's a matter of slicing away until everything is in fist-size or smaller hunks.)  After everything is cut up, the 1/3 portion for the poor was hauled over the school, where it joined the growing stack on the porch.

I also provided (much more skilled) calculator services when it came time to figuring out the meat allotments.  With 450 kg meat and about 932 Muslim residents of Nondokul, it worked out to just under 1/2 kg per person.  But the total population included those who had bought animals (and are not poor), so in the end they decided a rounded 1/2 kg would work, and no further calculations were needed.  The per person accounting was new for Nondokul; it used to be divvied up per household.  From what I understand this traditional communally organized system is dying out, many villages now do as in the cities, where every one gives as they please to beggars who show up at their door.  So an efficient 1-hour process in replaced by a day-long house-to-house trek for the poor.

Checking off names as family units collect their bagful