Ramadan again

I was about to write a whole post on the holy month of Ramadan, which we are 10 days into here in Indonesia (and for all devout Muslims around the world), and then I realized that I've been writing this blog for well over 1 year and probably wrote about it last year. And I did! Yippee! That's one post I don't have to write because if you're interested to know more about it you can go here to see what I wrote last year. Not much has changed since last year. The biggest change is that we moved to a new house in a complex last year, so our neighborhood isn't nearly as noisy. We can still hear the mosques, but they aren't as loud and we can no longer here the neighborhood "festivities". Since we're non-Muslims and we're in a huge cosmopolitan city, Ramadan doesn't change our lives in a big way. There are a few minor inconveniences here and there, but compared to what our Muslim neighbors are doing it is nothing. This year for Idil Fitri we will be staying in Jakarta. We were late in our planning this year and by the time we looked into getting away airline prices were already pretty steep. Jakarta will pretty much shut down for the 2 days of Idil Fitri, as in, I don't even think we can order a pizza or go to the grocery store. So it's a good time to get away, but on the other hand it will be nice to live in such a quiet city for once!

If you want to read more factual information, you can click here. I "get" the principles behind Ramadan; I can see how fasting all day and sacrificing sleep could make one more humble, more patient (maybe), more faithful. But, I also think it's crazy. I can't imagine not being able to drink a glass of water for 12 hours straight, all the while working, taking care of children, tending fields?! Plus, in order to eat enough calories to last throughout the day, you have to eat a lot during the night. So, you're eating at the expense of sleeping. I understand that during the month of Ramadan people will eat on and off from 6-9 p.m., and then sleep until 3 a.m., when they will wake up and start eating until the sun rises about 6. That's 6 hours of sleep every night for 30 nights.

That's gotta take a toll! There have been plenty of sleep studies showing that people need an average of 8 hours of sleep/night and that sleep deprivation makes people overly emotional, less capable of working machinery and doing general tasks, influences the brain's ability to make memories, etc. It makes me wonder just what a month of fasting and sleep deprivation does to people and to their country as a whole with regards to productivity, incidences of traffic, home and industrial accidents, etc... If anyone comes across any studies looking at this, let me know!

So, as you're enjoying your 8 hours of sleep every night (hopefully!), your morning coffee, your lunch, that refreshing glass of water during the day, just remember that during the entire month of September millions of people around the world are not...