Tabaski- How much sheep can you eat?

I have recently experienced my first Tabaski, or Eid al-Adha as it's known throughout the Muslim world. It is essentially the Muslim equivalent of Christmas, and by far the largest holiday I will celebrate in Senegal with my host family. Most holidays and celebrations here boil down to 2 things: wearing fancy Senegalese clothes and eating lots of meat (sheep or goat). Because this is a larger celebration, we did these 2 things for 3 days. The premise of Tabaski is the sacrifice of a sheep, symbolic of the story of Abraham, who was willing to kill his first-born in God's name, but was provided by God a ram to sacrifice instead. Our family has had the marked sheep picked out for months; it's been tied up to various shade structures in my compound, getting fattened up for the big day. I was also in Dakar the days leading up to Tabaski, and the images of hundreds of sheep by random intersections was quite a sight, but everybody who can afford it is in the market for their own sheep that time of year!
On the big day I threw on my (thus far only) Senegalese complet and sat with the women of my house. I witnessed 3 sheep getting killed and skinned and prepped for cooking. We had meat for 3 meals that day... and for the next 3 days. Needless to say, I'm a little sheeped-out. Quite frankly, I think I could never eat sheep again and be perfectly happy.
It was great to see everyone in my village in their finest complets coming around, greeting and forgiving/asking for forgiveness. Most people spend a lot of time with their "fedde" or age group, essentially hanging out with their groups of friends, drinking tea or juice, and hanging out. The younger fedde's have some music and dancing, the older fedde's mostly sit around. In village my real age rarely corresponds to my companions, so I spent a lot of time hanging out with the older women.
Other than dressing up, greeting, hanging out and eating meat, there wasn't too much more to the holiday, and as I'm still a bit of an outsider to cultural things, I found myself with a bit of down time throughout the holiday. It was definitely an experience and interesting to see, though honestly I don't know if I'll be sticking around village for meat-a-thon 2013.

In other news, school is starting up again so I'm looking forward to working more at the primary and middle schools, where I think I'll base the bulk of my projects. When I first arrived, I was intimidated by the fact that I'll be spearheading projects on my own, but after being here for 8 months, assisting in other volunteers' projects, and really getting used to life here, I'm naturally finding avenues for work and am excited to start some good projects in my village!