A Very Special Animal
We recently celebrated the end-of-Ramadan holiday with three days of festive visits to neighbors. Although we hadn’t been fasting, we joined them for cups of chai and tasty local dishes. One of our visits took us to the neighbors whose yard backs up on our yard; we look out at their vegetable garden from our kitchen window.
As we sat drinking tea, I heard their rooster crowing outside. 
The family’s 21-year-old daughter, Abie, who speaks some English, told us the local word for rooster (“kwakor”) and crow (“bong”) and went on to describe how special the rooster is to her. She told us that before the advent of electricity and loudspeakers, Muslims who lived out of earshot of a mosque relied on the rooster to wake them up for the dawn prayer time. I watched Abie’s face as she talked about how important dawn prayers were to her. Her eyes lit up as she described her happiness when she hears the rooster’s crow and starts the day with prayer.
It’s unusual to meet people who genuinely delight in early morning prayers, and that’s as true among Muslims as it is among Christians. Seeing the glow on Abie’s face as she thought of her morning connection with God is something I’ll remember for a long time. Their “kwakor” often does his early-morning crowing from the top of the garden wall, and from now on when I hear him I’ll think of Abie starting her prayers. And I’ll turn my own thoughts toward prayer, hopefully with at least as much joy.
Posted in Uncategorized and tagged rooster by Lisa