A different kind of Ramadan

Tomorrow at sundown, about 1.4 billion people around the world will count down the seconds until feasting on the tasty relief of iftar/buka puasa. As the sun dips below the horizon, 14 million other people will begin a 24 hour period of fasting, prayer, introspection, and pseudo-luddism as cars, TV, electricity and everything else is haram. Yom Kippur is kind of like the Jewish Ramadan except with one hundredth of the people observing for one thirtieth of the time. I’m sure there are a lot of Jews and a lot of Muslims who would take issue with that last statement, for a wide variety of reasons, but they’re all wrong. The holidays are both of the somber/introspective sort with the goal of spiritual cleansing and abstaining from all that is bad. The origin of Yom Kippur comes from the day Moses descended from Mt. Sinai (by the way, if you find yourself in Dahab and someone in your group tries to convince you to do the Mt. Sinai sunrise hike, the answer should be no. Just chill on your pile of cushions, light up a shisha and maximize your Dahab time. Seriously.) to see the Israelites praying to a darn golden calf. To make up for this honest mistake the Israelites spent the day repenting and made it an annual thing.

I’m writing from the windswept Sonoran desert in the city of Tucson (no AIESEC here :-( ) in the southwestern corner of the US, about 60 miles from Nogales, Mexico. Not exactly Mecca, I know, but here I’m running a youth program involving recently arrived refugee high school students. Most of my students are Somali Bantu, Iraqi or Sudanese and most of them are Muslims celebrating their first Ramadan in the US. So far, Ramadan’s been rough on the students. Imagine trying to explain why the plural of ‘life’ is not ‘lifes’ to a group of homesick and highly hormonal high schoolers with parched mouths and grumbling stomachs. And imagine that the majority of your students (the Somali Bantu) have grown up without a written language. All of these students live in the same few apartment complexes around Tucson so I hope to stop by and take up one of their iftar invitations sometime next week.

Simultaneously I am doing the whole Yom Kippur thing, cause I’m a somewhat observant Jew and all. But this is Blogging Ramadan, not Blogging Yom Kippur (which would be a complete failure as computers are off-limits), so I'll do my best to stay on topic. Expect updates later with more perspectives of Ramadan as a refugee in America and then my perspective as a Yom Kippur-celebrating Jewish-American running a predominantly Muslim youth program during the month of Ramadan. Whew… Ramadan Kareem and L’Shanah Tovah to everyone reading!