Day four ~ Happy Eid Mubarak

… by Petr

Today was a day of my first visit in Fót and I couldn’t wish for better day to start. Because today something special and I believe very precious happened. Today in many muslim countries  the fest was celebrated, Eid Mubarak (blessed celebration). And I have impression than this celebration is awaited by the children, almost as strongly as the Christmas in the european countries. And I was happy to see that because of our “happy house”  40 young refugees could celebrate this joyful  fest in Hungary, during their difficult journey of searching for new home.

The very important part of the celebration is food. And to have wonderful dishes on the table means to work quite a lot. It was impressive to see, how few 14 -16 years old boys, who met each other just few days ago, can work together many hours from the morning to prepare as nicest dishes as they were able.

The day before we offered them, that we can buy some things for this celebration and they didn’t start to order from us many and many things, they didn’t take disadvantage of our offer and didn’t use it to try something very expensive and exotic as maybe I would do in their age. They asked just for very simple things as fruits, vegetables, rize with meat, cola… And they managed to prepare a very beautiful fest-table with it!

Another wonderful thing to see was, how also the boys respect each other and try to be opened to each other and also to us. During the fest itself the most of the time we were sitting in a circle, loud afghan music was playing and in the middle there was always someone dancing. I think that everyone had his time to show the others, how he can dance. And some of them danced really beautifully, some of them maybe little bit comically…But the great thing was, that no one laught on one other, no one said “you look silly!”. I had an impression, that they don’t think like this, they really just enjoyed the present moment and the fact, that they can be together and in this way we could learn something from them.

It was really a very harmonic celebration, although the first impression (very loud music, shouts, clapping hands) could be different. We didn’t have to do much, to organize them much. They were willing to help and they were happy with very little. One of the boys, Ibrahim from Pakistan, took me aside during the dancing and he showed me the table full of plates of simple but colourful dishes, behind a circle of smiling boys and in the middle of them three other dancing without shoes on the arabic carpet and he said to me: “This is an afghan happiness!”