Volunteering at a local, public school on Nov 16th, 2010

I decided to use my talents to help teach English to Indonesian children whose parents cannot afford a private school education. The Indonesian government passed a law 4-years ago requiring public schools to teach English as a foreign language to students beginning in 4th grade. Many teachers in public school are not fully prepared to teach English. As such, this organization's main purpose is to teach teachers how to teach English as a 2nd language. So, I signed up to co-teach 6th grade English once a week for an hour and half.

It's been an adventure! On my first day, I was greeted by a cow and 3 goats. I thought they were the school's mascots.

See the 3 goats in the back ground?!?!?!

I asked the teacher I will be working with why they had these animals in the court yard, and she explained that they were going to kill them for the Eid al-Adha Festival.

Immediately, when I got home I looked up more information. Here's what Wikipedia has to say...

Eid al-Adha (Arabic: عيد الأضحى‎ ‘Īdu l-’Aḍḥā) or "Festival of Sacrifice" or "Greater Eid" is an important religious holiday celebrated by Muslims worldwide to commemorate the willingness of Abraham (Ibrahim) to sacrifice his son Ishmael (Isma'il) as an act of obedience to God, before God intervened to provide him with a ram to sacrifice instead.^[1] The meat is divided into three parts to be distributed to others. The family retains one third of the share, another third is given to relatives, friends and neighbors, and the other third is given to the poor & needy.


So, what's the moral of the story?!?!?! Dont get attached to goats and cows before Eid al-Adha.