Today I saw first hand what it was like to experience both fasting and iftar.  With my host family being Christian, I had yet to have the chance to experience iftar, the large dinner that comes after sunset during Ramadan; therefore, my best friend in the program offered to have me over for their Friday iftar.  The invitation came with two conditions though:

1.) that my friend, Rob, and I make the dinner and

2.) that we both fast for the entire day, meaning no food or drink until sundown.

Ramadan exists for the purpose of allowing Muslims to come closer to their faith and the core values of Islam. Teaching patience, teaching Muslims to sympathize with the poor who suffer from hunger and thirst everyday, fasting is a very effective mean in achieving the ends of Ramadan.  Having never fasted, I had no clue as to what to expect when I woke up on Friday morning.  Being in college, I have obviously had the occasionally extra stressful day that precludes me from having breakfast or lunch; however, I can never recall having seen the sunset come before my first piece of food or glass of water.

Walking through kitchen and not getting a bowl of cereal felt a little weird; however, I did not have any real urges to eat or drink until around noon.  Activity is the best remedy to assuage the waves of hunger and thirst that will inevitably come up throughout the day; therefore, I watched a DVD for an hour until it was time to go to the supermarket to get the food that we would make for iftar.

For some reason, Rob’s host family thought that I could make pizza since I was Italian, so that was the food we were asked to make for the dinner that night.  For the food we went to C-Town, a supermarket chain that would resemble any chain that exists in the United States.  Placing your temptations right in front of you, walking through a grocery is probably not the best thing to do while fasting as it only reminds you of what you can not have until sundown.  Either way, the two of us got through this challenge and brought the groceries back to Rob’s house.

Just as being in a grocery store does not make fasting any easier, so too does making food only augment the churning in the stomach and the scratchiness in the mouth.   As the day advances, your thirst rather than your hunger is what really begins to wear on your mind.  With your mouth being quite dry, engaging in a prolonged conversation becomes quite an ordeal; however, seeing as how Rob and I had never made pizzas on our own before, we did not have worry about this fact though as all our attention was on not messing up his family’s first meal of the day.  Surprisingly, the whole process went pretty smoothly after a few botched tries at kneading out the dough.

Before we knew it, the sky was beginning to orange and red, and within a half hour we found ourselves enjoying iftar.

The best aspect about iftar is the way that it gets families to eat dinner together almost every night over a month long span.  Whereas finding an American family eating together on a Friday night would be quite an ordeal, finding a Muslim family eating together on a Friday night during Ramadan is the norm rather than the exception.  When the meal was over I asked one of Rob’s host brothers how it made him feel that there were still 25 days left in Ramadan.  He responded that he was happy because the month long period allowed him to get closer to both his family and his faith.