The Hajj Ritual

I haven’t connected to the internet for ages! I have a good reason for that. I went to Mecca for Hajj about 2 weeks ago. My mom, my dad, and I stayed in the apartment in Syisya (near Mina). My dad rents the whole apartment plus four other buildings for his pilgrims. He had approx. a thousand pilgrims this year. Living there for about a week before Hajj starts and four days after that was totally boring! I have no friends over there, my mom was busy coordinating the catering, and my dad always had a hectic schedule, preparing for Hajj. I actually helped my dad ~ being his-two-weeks-secretary, but I think I played games a lot than doing the duty. We had many guests for Hajj this year; my grandma (actually she arrived in Jeddah shortly before I arrived), my aunt and uncle (from Egypt), and 2 people who are also part of our family, uncle Amir and auntie Huda who came from Syria.

I was pretty much excited about the Hajj this year, because it was the first time I made pilgrimage to Mecca. Honestly, I made ‘the trip’ for so many times when I was a child, but I wasn’t really aware about the meaning of Hajj, nor that I actually studied how the Hajj is performed. After I studied that stuff in High School and my age is quite mature, I felt ready to try and “practice” it. Our first destination was definitely Arafat. My family left Syisya for Arafat on Wednesday, 19th of January. We arrived slightly before Dzuhur prayer. We were actually very lucky — because my dad is a Hajj agent (dealing with VIP pilgrims), we could enter to a VIP area, where we could freely take any food and drinks we want. We stayed in a tent, prayed to God, and did our worship. I love the weather that day, it was very good, in fact, some people said it was quite cold. Everything was under control until we left Arafat for Muzdalifah / Mina.

We left at 10 o’clock at night and left Arafah by a huge bus. It was a very very tiring and exhausting journey. It took approx. 8 hours to go to Mina. I’m telling u, it wasn’t very far — in fact — it was NEAR (it usually takes FEW MINUTES to go there!!!!). But TRAFFIC JAM was a really huge problem!!! Yeah, right, 2.5 million people gathered in the same place and the roads (from Arafat to Mina) hasn’t been wider — still the same. It was crowded!!! We couldn’t even manage to take stones in Muzdalifah because the police didn’t allow us to park the bus there (the parking was so packed), so we decided to straight away go to Mina and take the stones there. CNN reported that it was one of the biggest traffic jams in the world!!! Wow!
We arrived at about 5.30 am, then went to Jamarat for throwing the stones. I was so surprise to see how big the Jumarat’s pillar was (the Saudi government has just refurbished the pillars last year because of the increasing number of death each year in a crush during the stoning ritual). It made me easy to throw the stones because of its bigger space.

Well, the journey hasn’t over yet; 2 more days to go. Alhamdulillah, the 2nd night, and after that was smooth. We could manage to do our duties for God. The last day of stoning ritual was very hard. Everyone didn’t expect the storm and rain would fall heavily to Mecca (and Jeddah too). It was totally a mess! A whole city was flooded!!! Everybody was so scared that they thought of tsunami would hit the area. But Thank God, no. Although it was flooding, my mom insisted to go to Jumarat for the last stoning before Maghrib prayer. It was the first time of my life that I saw how struggle people were – trying to go to Jumarat, fighting with quite a big wave, etc. We didn’t have an umbrella, so we used the garbage bags (the big black one) to cover our bodies. Alhamdulillah everything was under control. I’m thankful that I finished my Hajj ritual, amin.