Saltown(not the real name): The Great Adventure

Last Saturday, Amber and I woke up early for an adventure. I stumbled out of bed, rushing through my morning routine (picking up/petting the cat to get him to stop meowing at me, feeding him, starting hot water and coffee, brushing my teeth, and washing my face), and then I quickly started mixing together a big batch of semolina cookie dough. When the dough was finished, Amber baked the cookies while I dressed and packed an overnight bag consisting mostly of water. As the cookies cooled, I threw together a quick snack to hold us over until lunch. We grabbed our backpacks, now laden with cookies, our helmets, and our bikes; and finally headed out the door around 11am.
About an hour later, we were walking our bikes up the last, steep, two kilometer hill to the beautiful mountain village of Saltown. At the top of the hill, there is a collection of adobe houses, a stone-walled animal pen, and two stand-alone schoolrooms. The first is bigger and newer, made of concrete. The second is made of a strange composite; thin concrete-foam panels, braced by intermittent boards of wood. I can tell how the room was constructed because its missing most of it’s front wall and ceiling. There are old rotted school desks piles on one side of the classroom. Staring at me from the back wall, through a gaping whole in the front, is a 10ft painting of Mickey Mouse smiling. I can see straight through this classroom. Behind Mickey is a bright green oasis blooming from the depths of a deep canyon ripped into mountains. One nonsensically tall and narrow kasbah pokes out of the green mass felting the canyon base. Other tightly clustered adobe structures dot the edges of the foliage and cling to the steep canyon sides. The crumbled classroom stands teetering at the edge of the canyon overlooking it all. The children have to hike up the steep canyon walls to get to school each day, and many have a long journey before that. Teachers usually choose to live in the houses up here near the school.
We whizzed by this view on our bikes. Nearing the steep road down the canyon, I passed an old women with a bag of harvested grass on her back. She carried it from the canyon bottom to feed her sheep. I smiled and said hello as I pass but didn't slow down. By the time Amber got to her, she suspected who we were and asked her "Where are you going?". "We're here to visit the new teacher at the school", she said. "Oh. Well she lives over here with me" the old women responded. I back-tracked to them and she walked us to her house. Inside, we were warmly greeted by our friend/neighbor/language-tutor. She recently got a job as a French and Math teacher in this town. She rents a room from the old woman who lives alone near the school. She calls the woman Xalti, which means “aunt on my mothers side”.
We are shown into our friends room, where we present her with the gift of cookies. Then she makes us tea and starts an egg-tagine cooking. Over tea, bread, and eggs, we discuss the news of our duwar. We mention that we saw a grey donkey running through our neighborhood, his owner desperately chasing him, the bottom end of an empty bright orange oil jug strapped around his snout. In other news, I mention that we randomly walked 45minutes down the road into the middle of a vast rock field with two of her sisters. There they met with two of her cousins to chat about secret matters. News trickles in our town.
When the tea and tagine were consumed, we had a language lesson consisting mostly of reviewing our answers on a test we did the week before. We are getting pretty good at reading and writing TashlHite. Its a shame that Tash isn't a written language, and that I don't have time to formulate each sentence in a conversation the way I do when I write. Next weeks homework will be to watch a TashlHite movie and practice listening (by far, the hardest thing about this language).
After the lesson, Xalti’s daughter arrives. She invites us to her house halfway down the canyon wall for tea We pass gaggles of women perched on the path, enjoying the cool afternoon air. When we get to her house, to young boys are chasing each other around giggling. We go into the living-room, which hangs over the path, with windows that expose beautiful views up the canyon. Along with tea and bread, our host offers fresh almonds and walnuts gathered from the tree groves below. We point out the beautiful table cover. Our host knit this herself, but modestly dismisses her skills as the result of boredom. She is soft-spoken, humble, and giving. On our way out, after tea, her husband comes home from work. Also humble, with a small stature and kind eyes, he works at the nearby salt mines. We express interest in the mines, which immediately prompts an invitation to accompany him to work the next morning. We agree to meet him on the road at 7am the next day.
On the way back up the hill, we run into a gentleman sitting outside his house with a few of his sisters. He speaks to us in French despite numerous attempts to explain that we don’t speak French and requests to please speak Tash. Finally we manage a short conversation in Tash (still dotted with French words) and I realize he’s slurring his speech. As we walk away, he calls up to our tutor, “I have a gift for those foreigners. I am an artist. I will bring it to you later tonight”. Our tutor skeptically agrees and passes the message on to us. I ask her if he was drunk and she says “Yes, he is an alcoholic. Everybody here knows it and his family worries about him.” She is surprised I could tell.
When we arrive back at her house, she begins some fried bread and tea as a late snack. Just as the bread hits the table, a knock is heard at the door. Our friend from the road has come with our gift. He presents me with a heavy slate of rock on which he has painted a colorful scene. Its beautiful and quintessentially Moroccan. He joins us at the tea table and spends the next two hours discussing heartfelt, complicated, ethereal matters in multiple languages, with me straining to finding new levels of concentration to try to understand. Shortly before leaving, he admits to me that he has a problem. He has a nice house in Marrakech, but he is here in the country with his family to try to “change his brain”; to find peace. As he leaves, I wish him luck on his journey and express a hope to meet him again happily in Marrakech some day.
It’s late and we have to be up early tomorrow. A quick dinner of pasta with milk and sugar is serve. (Surprisingly, this is the one meal I have discovered in Morocco that I simply cannot stomach. I can’t explain it in words, but I literally gag at the thought of it). Luckily I had already filled up on bread and tea so after choking down a few bites I go to bed satisfied.
The next morning, we wake up and prepare ourselves with the predawn air still chilling our bones. As promised, our guide for the day meets us on the road and takes the lead. We wander to the base of the canyon, through a series of passageways under adobe dwellings, through the fields, over a log spanning the river, up the other side of the canyon, and into the mountains to the north. After an hour of strenuous hiking, our trail begins to glisten. Piles of dark grey and pinkish salt crystal line the road to a large truck standing idle. Behind the truck wooden shacks have been built into the mountain. These are cave entrances. We enter one shack, where a crane hangs over an bottomless hole. Our guide explained that this is where the salt is brought up from the mine. Workers enter another cave to the south, wind down into the depths of the mountain, collect their salt, and bring it to the crane to be lifted out. We hang around the opening of the cave for twenty minutes waiting for the rest of the workers to arrive. A confident man with course speech and mannerisms shows up and offers to take us down into caves. “Is it dangerous“, we ask. Our guide replied, “I don’t go down there. It scares me”. This is the first time I’ve heard a Moroccan male express fear; which only amplified my curiosity. Another man says, “Just be careful. We’ll let you borrow some flashlights. You’ll be fine”. The course man lights a gas lantern, hands me a cheap plastic flashlight, and leads the way. We walk fifteen feet into another wood cabin before the true decent begins. Suddenly, the ground seems to fall way. The trail thins to no more than a foot wide and continues to get steeper. It hugs the chiseled wall on the left and drops into shear darkness on the right. I can see only a few feet of the narrow trail in front of me. With each step, my sandals slip on ground worn smooth from use, lubricated by a quarter inch of damp cave soot collected over decades. The trail levels and I breathe a sign of relief, but we turn a corner and the ground drops off again. When we finally reach the true bottom, my heart is in my throat. I shine my flashlight out into the darkness and a huge arching cave wall sparkles back at me from the distance. The cave narrows to the left where two perfectly square diverging passageways have been chiseled into a flat salt wall. Every surface is like staring at a crystal ocean from an airplane; millions of waves creating an intricate omnifaceted plane. Our new guide explains how to remove salt evenly. We take a few moments to marvel at the subterreanian sights, and head back up the perilous trail.
At the top, we thank the men for showing us their work and we start walking back the way we came. When the canyon town is again in sight, we stop at the top of the hill and eat a snack. We have been hauling bread, tea, and a can of sardines for this event. A couple of young girls are harvesting weeds nearby and we invite them over to nosh. When the food is gone, they accompany us to the bottom of the canyon and split off to the left. We continue on, up the other side, back to the house. My legs are exhausted from a combination of climbing steep mountains and clenching my thighs in fear.
We help our tutor prep vegetables for a tagine. When the tagine is prepped and cooking, she brings us into the TV room to relax until lunch. Xalti wanders in and turns on the TV to entertain us. A while later, she ushers in two strangers. They are also teachers. One works here in Saltown. The other works in a neighborhood near ours. He biked here this morning to spend the day with his friend. Amber is sitting closest to the portable propane tank, so she is put in charge of making tea. We chat and drink tea with the men until finally lunch is served. It is a colorful and delicious beef and vegetable tagine, topped with crisp golden fries. When we are all full, Amber makes more tea, and we explain that we should probably head home before its too late. The teacher who biked here suggests that we all go back together and asks that we wait about an hour so they can go pray first. Meanwhile we wander over to the canyon edge for a last look at the beautiful sight. We run into Xalti’s daughter and thank her again for her generosity. We ask her also to thank her husband for the exciting salt mine experience.
When we get back to the house, Xalti has a bag of walnuts for us to take home. Our tutor fills our empty cookie tupperware with local dried figs. We pack it all up including the rock artwork from the night before. Then the teacher reappears ready to leave. We say our final goodbyes and strap on our backpacks, heavy with gifts, and I think to myself, “Its a good thing the road from this magical place is mostly downhill.”

Barbershop Cultural Exchange Part I

So I was getting pretty shaggy around the neck and ears after a cold winter of not getting my hair cut. Finally I bit the bullet, made the 30 minutes walk into town and stopped off at the neighborhood barbershop. I walked in to find my normal barber not there. Instead, his early-twenties counterpart was sitting alone in one of the waiting chairs flipping through satellite TV stations.
"Are you cutting hair now?" I asked. "Yeah. Come have a seat". I noted that my normal guy was gone and he offered to let me wait until he returned, but I guess I'm not too loyal about these sorts of things so I sat down and let him strap on the bib.
Moroccan barbershops can be pretty nice. Our barbershop is the only establishment in my whole community with glass and carved-wood doors, where ugly sheet metal doors are the norm. Inside are two leather barber chairs strategically placed in front of a wall-to-wall mirror above a tiled countertop. On top of the counter, among the trimming paraphernalia, is a fancy plastic double-wall insulated thermos. This contains piping hot water so that when they sprits your hair or wipe away trimmings with a wet towel, it will be warm and refreshing (a pleasant and thoughtful amenity in these cold months). On the back wall, across from the mirror are three waiting chairs and a coat rack. Above the mirror, looming large in the left upper corner of the room is a medium-sized satellite TV with remote.
Today the remote belonged to my young hairdresser friend. He put it down to settle me in to my chair and got started snipping away at the fringes of my head. Soon another man came in and sat down and we all made small talk. The topic of me being American was broached (as it was fairly obvious), and before long the young hairdresser was developing a plan to make me feel more at home. He grabbed the remote from of the tiled counter and deftly punched in a series of numbers which left the TV above us loudly broadcasting MTV. He thought I would appreciate the "sounds from home", which in fact, were the rhythmic spittings of rap great Jay-Z. MTV had deemed it entertaining to create a "Top 20 Video Countdown" highlighting his extensive work. I'm not sure how the elderly Berber man waiting for his haircut felt about it, but my barber seemed to enjoy at least the beat.
To be honest, I was feeling at home, as a result. Especially when during one song, they asked to translate what he was saying. I hesitated for a moment and then said "ntta, dars bzzef n mashakil, welayni, urdars walo mushkil n tirvatin", which I though was a fairly direct, if not slightly more respectful translation of the original wording "I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one".
The American wisdom seemed to resonate strongly with these men. They bobbed their heads while I kept mine as still as possible for the remainder of the haircut. After trimming my neck and sideburns with a straight razor, he invited me to come to his house for a meal. I said that I was in a rush, paid my 10Dhs, left through the carved-wood door, and wandered down the dirt road with a head free from a heavy load of hair,
but full of catchy beats.

Glaoui Prison

I am standing five stories up, on the roof of a towering kasbah that belonged to the most infamous family in all of Morocco. I had no idea this place existed just twenty minutes ago. Wind whistles past my ears while a flock of doves, spooked by our unlikely presence, circumnavigate the crumbling adobe turret to my left. A sea of lesser adobe buildings stretches out before me.
The kasbah is positioned on a hill, lofted up from the riverbed, in the center of my site, and overlooks the entire region. This spot is the highest point for miles around. I follow the path of the river down the valley with my eyes, and clearly see a town I know to be 36k away. The fields on each side of the river, which were grey and dying from winter's chill just a week before, now appear overstuffed and fluffy with an abundance of white almond tree blossoms. I glance at my friend, who is visiting my site for a few days to do a training. We express without words that this unexpected event is truly mind-blowing and unforgettable. As I slowly rotate, taking in the whole experience, I think to myself, "How did I get here"?
A few hours before, I had left my house hoping to find a Moroccan friend who works at the cyber. A week before, I had complimented him on the photos he was using to make a video montage. He told me he had taken the pictures at a nearby kasbah, and suggested that we go sometime. Today I had hoped to take him up on his offer. I ran into him near the main road about halfway to the cyber, and asked if he had time to show me and my friends the kasbah. He said yes, and told us to continue on to the cyber where he would meet us shortly. When he arrived at the cyber, we were all easily sidetracked by another cyber employee playing an online Arabic version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire". For a while, the five of us -- three American PCVs and two young educated Moroccans -- made an unlikely, but effective team. They would read the questions in Standard Arabic, translate them for us into a mix of Moroccan Arabic, TashlHite and what little English they knew; at which point we would all pool our collective knowledge until an answer was chosen. After about a half an hour of this; satisfied with winning a $64,000 prize, we walked out of the cyber towards the yet unknown kasbah.
We took the scenic route through the fields, and stopped first at an attractive area with a patch of grass, a flowing brook, and grove of Aspen trees. From there, we walked down the riverbed until we were standing just below the kasbah; its massive mud walls soaring overhead. This is when our Moroccan friend floored us with the historical significance of the structure.
"Do you know who lived here?, he said. "The Glaoui family. Do you know about them"? Our jaws dropped. He continued, "It used to be a prison, and they lived here too". As we ascended the steep road, curving along the base of the tall outer walls, he pointed us to the large door which led to the jail section. We slipped into the dark cells just long enough to discover that this was not a fun place to be locked up, and got back on the road towards the main entrance.
The "Glaoui", were a family of Berber warlords who controlled the south of Morocco with an iron fist. Known for their brutality, they commonly tortured, murdered, and imprisoned their opposition. Supported by the occupying French, who needed assistance in oppressing the defiant southern Berber tribes, the Glaoui family maintained their fierce control of the area through a system of fear and unregulated taxes (mandatory gifts for the populous).
Their wealth is reflected in the stature of the kasbah. We had toured the modern annex first. Plaster and lavish paintwork; a strange architectural style -- Berber and French design struggling to coexist -- mirroring the political state of Morocco when this house was built. Of course, we now know that both sides lost. The paint of an extravagant archway had been marked with a completion date-- 1390 on the Muslim calander, we decide must have been around 1938. Our Moroccan friend informs us that the house was finally abandoned in the 70's. The painted walls are marred and cracked where looters have stolen wiring. A large hole in the floor near the entryway has fallen in, exposing the empty prison cells below. Somehow, a bathtub is still intact in the center of an empty tiled bathroom.
We edged past the hole in the ground and made our way to the original adobe section of the kasbah. The first floor is dark and hard to navigate, save a spot of sun, shining down through a central column. The stairs spiral up one of the turrets allowing access to each of four floors before reaching the top. The floors are built around a hollow, square-shaped column that extends the entire height of the kasbah. On each floor, huge keyhole-shaped windows have been sculpted into the four walls of the central column to let in light. On the third floor, we took turns standing in the keyholes to get our new favorite self-portraits. On the final flight of stairs, there are torn playing cards and empty candy wrappers. This is a great place to hide; whether its from your parents or an attacking Berber tribe. The Glaoui Family made many enemies during their bloody reign. This incredible structure would have protected them from most of them; easy to defend, difficult to attack, and a view from the top that left nothing to question. I stand among the doves and the clouds and wonder.....how does something so beautiful come from such terror? I believe opulent castles all around the world, pose the same question. But right now I am enjoying the silver lining.

Peace Corps Love Match

We get a healthy number of neighborhood visitors at our house. Not enough to be annoying, but enough to feel included in the community. Most of the time, they are careful to come around late morning or late afternoon, which ensures that they won't wake us up, or interrupt any meals. Occasionally, though, they aren't so thoughtful.
One morning a few weeks ago, we got a heavy knock on our metal door at the unreasonable hour of 8am! In the summer, we would probably have been up by then, but on these dim, blustery, winter mornings, we like to sleep a little later in order to give the sun a little time to wake up and do its thing. Needless to say, the knocking woke us up. When we didn't respond, the knocking got louder and more insistent. Eventually, our guest even picked up a rock to bolster the sound. Still, I was not about to jump out of bed, get dressed, and try to speak TashlHite in my current state. I stayed in bed hoping that the visitor would give up.
Sure enough, the knocking stopped....that is until it resumed on the wall of my bedroom right next to my ear. Now I knew it was serious. Whoever was knocking must have been on a limited schedule. I jumped up and did exactly what I refused to do moments before. When I was dressed, I swung open the front door and jogged around to the back of the house where the second episode of knocking occurred. Nobody was near our house, but one of our friends and neighbors was poking around, working outside in her yard nearby. I walked over to her to see if she new what was going on. Seeing me coming, she yelled out, "Sorry. Did I wake you up"? By the time I got to her, Amber had finished dressing and was coming around the house, running to catch up. "Yeah", I said, "buts it's okay. We would have gotten up soon anyway. What did you want"? What she wanted, was our help in procuring a husband...
So why did she want our help in this regard? In fact, she has been proposed to many times, and tentatively engaged twice. The first engagement was to a distant cousin living in Agadir. The second engagement, which lasted only one day, occurred the prior week to the son of a neighbor. The brother of the man was getting married, so his father told him that he needed to get married too; since all the family was already coming for the wedding, and since a dual-marriage would save money. The man heard that our neighbor was a good choice for a wife, and proposed to her one week before the wedding date. Initially -- perhaps out of shock-- she agreed to be married. That night, however, she stayed up thinking about what a huge mistake she had made. In addition to having never met this man before, she was also haunted by the fact that he was unusually short. She lay awake in bed imaging herself walking down the street with him, and imagined passersby assuming that he was her son. She even considered not inviting her family to the wedding, so they wouldn't witness the horizontally challenged nature of her groom. The next morning, she begged her parents to call off the wedding. When the man came back the next day to get the business of the dowry out of the way, her mother informed the man that their agreement had gone south. Her mother's insistence was enough to dissuade her suitor temporarily, but she expected him to be back in the days to come.
The night before our rude awakening, our neighbor had talked to her friend in the Tiznit province, another PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) who had lived with our neighbors for her initial two months in country. They had discussed the problem, and her friend in Tiznit had offered an alternative groom (if she could get engaged before the man returned, she would have an excuse not to marry him). The PCV vouched for this new mans personality, and offered to send a picture of the man to see if he met our neighbors qualifications in terms of appearance. Now she needed our help getting the picture.
First, she needed the picture as soon as possible, so she could make her decision before the other suitor returned. Secondly, there was the issue of how to send it. Her whole family gets their mail sent to her fathers post office box, and only he picks up the mail. In a Muslim society like this one, you can't just opening send pictures of single men to young women. To solve the problem, we offered to try and get the picture via email, and also offered to let the picture be sent to our post office box in the event that email failed (which it did).While our neighbor waited as patiently as she could for the next few days, we diligently cooperated with the PCV in Tiznit to make sure everything went smoothly. When the picture arrived in our mailbox a few days later, we hastily gave it to its intended recipient, putting her future back in her hands.
Imagine it! If she likes the boy in the picture, they may very well be married within the year. And all thanks to a well-connected volunteer down south, and a couple of drowsy volunteers next door. Talk about making a difference in the lives of the locals!

Moroccan Wedding

A while back, we were invited to a traditional wedding ceremony taking place across the river from our duwar. We didn't know what time to arrive, but we were assured that any time before about 2pm would be okay. We left our house at 1pm, and made our first stop at the local hanut (convenience store) to buy a wedding gift. The hanut was closed, so we visited the house of the hanut owner to see where he was. His family said he was probably praying in the Mosque and would be back soon. By the time we got back to the hanut, the owner had appeared and was slowly unlocking the door. Now running a bit late, we slipped into the hanut, picked out two of the nicest cones of sugar we could find, slapped down 24 dirhams, and started heading towards the river. We skittered down the steep embankment into the dry riverbed and navigated the rocky surface until we reached the network of paths wondering through the fields. We hurried along the paths, zagging this way and that, finally reaching a path that climbed up into the back yard of a series of houses. Nobody could be seen, but we wondered towards a collection of empty cars parked next to the adobe structures until our friend noticed us crossing the field and called us into the house we had just passed.
Despite our haste, we had missed lunch; but the women in the kitchen made us some honorary tea and offered us left-over fruit. Meanwhile a parade of relatives wondered in and out, taking turns welcoming us, introducing themselves, and testing our language skills; "What is bread? What is in this water bottle? Do you know what a wall is?".
After we had finished our tea, and gave the sugar gift to our host, an awkward period of time followed, because we didn't have any reason to be there until dinner, which would start many hours later. I wondered around the house until I came to a big open room with Tagines all over the floor. A man I had met once before in town, was standing in corner working over a wheelbarrow. I asked, "what are all these tagines for"? "Dinner", he replied. When another man came in the room and made a joke about the foreigner helping cook (which he did in TashlHite not realizing that would understand), I latched on to the opportunity for cultural exchange and responded, "Waxxa, radak 3awnG (okay, I'll help you)". The truth is, I didn't really know how long it would last or what I was getting into, but my curiosity was piqued by such a collection of tagines; 40 in all. Next came 40 mjmers (braziers), followed by wheelbarrows of glowing coals. Each mjmer was filled with coal and then a tagine was placed on top with a little water inside to avoid cracking. While one man added the coal, the other man and I worked with a pair of large bellows to keep the coals hot under the tagines. Up until this point, the men had been humoring me. Now the work was hard, and they needed the help. They started taking my presence more seriously and telling me what to do next at every turn.
When all 40 tagines were set with sparkling coals below, a huge crate of raw meat was dragged into the room. Each tagine was given more hot water, about 1kilo hunk of beef, and a splash of oil (a mix of olive and vegetable). Next, they brought out the vegetables. A heavy crate of onions, a crate of tomatoes, a crate of potato, a crate of zucchini. One man grabbed a knife and started peeling the skins of the onions. Meanwhile, the other man grabbed jars of cumin, turmeric, paprika, pepper, salt, and cilantro, tossing spoonfuls of each over the meat in the tagines. I was beginning to be impressed. Men in Morocco don't cook?! And here I was in a room of men confidently cooking 40 tagines simultaneously. This, I thought, was worth sticking around for. I grabbed a free knife, pulled a stool up to the onion crate, and started peeling.
My action was followed by some celebration to the tune of, "Hey, the foreigner is still helping! He can peel onions! Go team tagine!" When the onions were done, I took a quick spin through the rest of the house and discovered why men were on tagine duty. In the kitchen, where 8 or 9 women hurriedly preparing copious amounts of couscous. Down the hall, in a room opening out into the courtyard, were 5 or 6 more women squatting in a smoky room making bread. While some kneaded bread dough, one women was carefully slathering dough and flipping sheets of bread in a stout, igloo-shaped adobe oven, whose bottom was covered with glowing hot pebbles. The last women slouched over the newly baked bread, removing pebbles that had baked into the dough.
Feeling over-shadowed by the hard work of the women, I returned to my tagine duties, which brought more praise for the foreigner as I started in on the tomatoes. It didn't take long in that smoke, meat, and testosterone filled environment to forget all about the more difficult toils of the women and regain my pride in "team tagine". I felt like doing a chest bump when we finished skinning the potatoes. Shortly thereafter, a tray of tea came in with a plate of olive oil and a folded loaf of steaming fresh bread. We gathered around the tea and bread, padding ourselves on the back for a well deserved break. When all the vegetables were prepped, we portioned them into the tagines, added water as needed, and prodded the coals to check for problems. Just then I was rushed to another house to witness part of the wedding ceremony.
Inside the next house was a large circle of people drumming and chanting tribal wedding songs around the groom. He was completely cloaked, and sitting down on a chair in the middle of the crowd. As people chanted, various family members and friends walked into the circle and dropped money for the new couple. This continued for over an hour. When it finally ended, I stole a moment of time to check on my tagines. I chatted for a minute or two with my co-cooks, but our conversation was interrupted by loud horns from outside. The father of the groom, who was eating some food at one end of the room, said, "Its the Bride. The bride has come from her city with all her family". Sure enough, as I walked outside into the dark night, a caravan of 15-20 car headlights could be seen approaching on the road. They honked their horns to a distinctly Berber beat, and women in the vehicles chanted to the rhythm of the horns. The caravan pulled right up to the front door, and hundreds of people poured out into the driveway and into the house. On the roof, the groom and his friends were throwing candy down to the guests gathered around to witness the arrival. The bride was totally covered, and adorned with the traditional flowing fake red hair and a heavy gold headdress. She was rushed into the house, and then I heard somebody say "dinner". With that, men began forming a line around the house to a large fancy guest room.
A partition down the center of the guest room effectively created two long, thin rooms (maybe 10'x40' each). The floors was lined with carpets and pillows, and short round tables were placed down the center of each room at 5' intervals. Men filtered in and took their seats on the floor, lining the walls. When everyone was present, the man nearest each table was selected to be the tea-maker for that table. A tea set was brought out for the selected men, and they prepared the tea, scrupulously adhering to the most elaborate and ceremonial Moroccan tea-making processes. When the tea was finally served, plates of cookies were past around the room, followed by a second batch of tea, and more plates of cookies. Eventually, the tea sets were bused from the tables, and replaced with tablecloths. Men began to encircle their nearest table in anticipation of main courses. Servers brought in tagine after tagine, placing one on each table with a healthy portion of bread. When my table's tagine arrived, it was served by one of my co-cooks, who pointed at me and said to the rest of the people at the table, "this foreigner cooked these tagines"! It was mutually agreed that we should pop the lid and give our dinner a taste. The bread was divided evenly among the group, the lid was doffed, "Bismillah (in the name of god)" was uttered, and we took our first bites.... Delicious! I was genuinely impressed, and so were my table-mates. I got some "tabarkallahs (congratulations)" and some "shukrans (thank you)" and then the focus went back to the food.
After the tagine, came a heaping plate of mouthwatering couscous, and finally, a plate of fruit. When the food was consumed, an old man stood up and prayed aloud for the new married couple. The rest of the men punctuated his prose with chants of "Amen". Other speeches followed, but by this time, the majority of the guests were already shuffling towards the exit. I found my shoes among hundreds of others in the entryway, and walked out into the cold winter-night air, waving goodbye to some of the men I had eaten with.
It had been hours since I had seen Amber (men and women generally eat separately at weddings). I walked over to the other house where the bride had entered, and where the women had all gone to continue their festivities. A few men were lounging outside the front door. "Do you know if the women are done eating yet?", I said. One man looked up at me in surprise, "No. They haven't even started yet". While I expected gender separate dining, I had not anticipated that women would, in fact, only eat after men had finished (probably to ensure that there was enough food for the men). I thanked the man for his information and wandered across the courtyard, settling into a spot atop a log. I still had at least an hour to wait. Might as well get comfortable.
Some sociologists say that social events like weddings and funerals are the best opportunity to really see what makes up a culture. For over an hour, I sat on that log, staring up into the stars, marveling at the unique opportunity I had found myself in, and noting the remarkable similarities and differences between this event and its American equivalent.

Fun with Language

In a perfect world, if you want to learn a language, full immersion is definitely the best strategy. Unfortunately, for students of Berber language, full immersion is nearly impossible to achieve. Even in my quaint, rural community, I routinely hear at least as many words from outside my "target language" as within. Of course, part of my problem is that I live here with my wife so I always have somebody with whom to engage in English-speaking conversations. Even if I were alone, there are just so many other languages being used. Men usually speak Darija (Moroccan Arabic), which is the preferred language of business; and educated professionals (teachers, nurses, etc.) commonly include French or the occasional Standard Arabic in their speech. Despite myself, I have learned to understand, but not speak, basic French language; like numbers and travel questions.
Nearly everybody in my area speaks some form of TashlHite (the Berber language). This varies in dialect depends on where they are from. Just about every region has its own unique dialect. If your lucky, dialectical changes are just differences in pronunciation. For example, up north in the Khenifra Province, they switch their "k" sound with a "sh" sound (i.e. "tafusht" instead of "tafukt", meaning "sun"). Or in my site, for some reason we replace most "b" sounds with "v". Most of the time, regional dialects also have their own vocabulary, so that their is at least 3 or 4 words for the same thing; one for each dialectical variation. For example; the word in my site for "good" is "iHla". In the next town over, which is all Arabic, the word for "good" is "mzien" or "zween". Just to the south they say "ifulki", and just to the west they say "ishwa". Incidentally, "ishwa" means "sharp" in my site (both smart and like a knife), which brings me to my next point:
TashliHite is short on adjectives. "IHla" is the word for good, but it is also the only word for every other adjective that is a synonym of "good". How do you say "amazing, awesome, wonderful, cool, neat, nice, hard-working, beautiful, great, pretty, and cute"? "IHla"! If your really trying to emphasize how good something is, the best you can do is start adding synonyms from the other dialects; "iHla", "zween", "ifulki", etc.. Actually, there is a word for beautiful ("idrf") , but I've never heard anyone use it. And there is a word for "hard-working" ("iharsh"), but in some dialects that just means busy. In my site, the word for fast ("izrbn"), also has the connotation of being busy or late for something. When I told my host mom that we were going fast during one of our daily health walks, she thought I was telling her I was late for something and needed to turn back. Now I know that if I want to compliment her on her walking speed, I have to say "datazalt", which literally translates to "you run".
That brings me to another point. Do you know what we say when we go on daily walks with our host mom? We say "Anskr L'marche". Her doctor told her to walk every day, but he must of used the French word for walk so now we say "lets make walking", with an ugly French word, even though their are perfectly good TashlHite words for "walk (verb)", "walking (noun)" and "run (verb)", among other possible options.
The "mohim" (point of the conversation in Darija) is that while I am technically immersed in foreign language most of the time, the variety of language, and the idiosyncrasies of these languages, make it very hard to master. That is not to say that I'm not getting better. It is just a way of justifying the following collection of embarrassing language-related "faux pas"s (arrrg... another French word).
"You?": Unlike the English language, TashlHite has more than one form of "you". There are in fact four versions; masculine and feminine singular, and masculine and feminine plural. The first time I met my mquddam (like a neighborhood government official), I said, "How are you (feminine) doing today?" He brushed it off, but the mistake was not lost on him, or any of the native-speakers within earshot....

"That's Handy!": The first time Amber and I traveled to Ouarzazate alone, we were very cautious not to get ripped off by the taxi drivers. When one of them started speaking to us in French, thinking that we were tourists, I replied in TashlHite, in an attempt to convince him that we were locals not to be messed with. Unfortunately I mixed up the body parts vocabulary lesson and said, "We don't need a taxi, we're just going to walk into town on our hands". The taxi driver was impressed, but not by my language skills...

"The Moroccan Mom Joke": We have some great, friendly neighbors on our neighborhood, who were early to accept us into the community, and willing to be good listeners when our language skills were still abysmal. During one of our conversations with them, we expressed our desire for a pet cat. A few months later, when their cat had kittens, they brought us one of the cats as a gift. Shortly after that, we were visiting their house for afternoon tea, and I saw an adult cat roaming around. I pointed at the cat, intending to ask if that was our new cat's mother. But because of difficulties with the possession indicator, I looked right at our neighbor, pointing at her cat and said, "Is that your mom?". It wasn't....

"Sharing Is Not For Everyone": We recently had 16 PC volunteers staying in our house for a regional meeting. Needless to say, that many people requires a lot of food, and much bigger cookware than we were equipped with. The day before everyone arrived I went over to our host-mom's house and asked her if I could borrow her large pot. The word for pot is "gamila". Unfortunately, I used the word "jamila", which is the name of her oldest daughter. She said, "Sean you can't have Jamila. She's got three young daughters of her own, but I'll let you borrow some pots instead...."

"Lady Bug": One day, while wandering through the fields with some friends, I noticed a small ladybug on a blade of grass. I pointed out the bug to our friends and asked, "whats this called?" Their response was "tabHusht" which is just the generic work for bug. Having just recently learned that word, I was excited to here it come up in conversation,a dn even more excited to try and use it. I exclaimed,"In America we say 'bug of woman'(tabHusht n tamagart)". The women we were with seemed to think this was much funnier than it seemed to me, until I realized that I had said "taboosh" instead or "tabHusht". That "H"soud is the difference between saying "bug" and saying "breast". I tried to explain myself through the giggling, but its very possible some people here still think we call those cute little red and black-polka dotted insects "breast of a woman".

L-3id Kbeer (some animals were harmed in the making of this blog post)

“L-3id Kbeer” literally translates to “Big Holiday”. “Kbeer” is the Arabic word for large, and of course “3id” is Arabic for “holiday”, with the “L” tacked on in Berber communities as a definite article identifying that the word has been borrowed from another language (this, by the way, has always reminded me of the way American hicks are portrayed in the movies when they say things like “do you listen to the rap”). Anyway, it is an appropriate name as the holiday proves to be a unanimous favorite among people in our community. Not unlike the American Thanksgiving holiday, the centerpiece of “L-3id Kbeer” is the slaughter and consumption of a delicious beast; in this case, ram. In rural areas, like the village I live in, getting a ram is in some ways easier and in other ways more difficult; easier because nearly every household has an animal pen and the means to take care of livestock; but harder because rural Moroccans are not wealthy and rams are incredibly expensive (of course the price goes up exponentially as the holiday approaches). Some people buy their ram months in advance, housing and feeding it all that time to avoid holiday prices. Conversely, some families breed sheep and ram all year in the hopes of making a good profit during “L-3id Kbeer”. In the city, things are a bit different. I spoke to a friend who lives in Rabat about his experience. He said he didn’t really care about the tradition of buying a ram, but his wife insisted that he buy one. Unfortunately, they live in an apartment, in a modern city, with not so much as a shared courtyard. Where is the ram going to go? Thousands of urban-dwelling Moroccans find themselves in this situation each year. The solution is to pay the ram dealer not only for the ram itself, but also for the continued care of the animal until the fateful day. On that day, the ram is delivered to the butcher of choice, and dispatched for the eating pleasure of the entire family.
We happened to be traveling the week prior to “L-3id Kbeer”, and what we witnessed from the seats of our bumpy souq bus was both impressive and hilarious. In every town we passed, from Marrakech to the smallest farming community, rams were everywhere. Rams with their hind legs held up, being pushed forward like wheelbarrows; rams bound and crammed into plastic crates on the backs of scooters; rams tied to city light posts and park fences; rams being walked on leashes down sidewalks; rams strapped to the hoods of cars atop mattresses and other goods; rams being carefully arranged in car trunks; even rams slung around necks like over-stuffed scarves. Imagine if everybody in America bought their Thanksgiving turkey live. Now imagine the Cost-Plus parking lot the week before Thanksgiving. That is what we were witnessing.
In our village, the real festivities began the day before. As if to work themselves up to the solid week or more of a strictly carnivorous diet, people buy some type of red meat on the eve of “L-3id Kbeer” (also known as “L-3id n Tifiyyi”: “the Meat Holiday”) and make delicious meat skewers. The meat is cubed and marinated in chopped onion, minced cilantro, salt, pepper, and generous amounts of cumin. Then it is slid onto skewers and placed onto a “mjmer” (clay brazier) filled with glowing coals. The coals are fanned with a stray piece of cardboard until the meat is browned and glistening on both sides. Finally, the meat is served with bread and sweat mint tea. In a day and a half, we were unknowingly invited to four meat skewer meals; two of them, the morning of “L-3id Kbeer”, before the ram ceremony. Already full of meat, our host mom sat us in front of the TV to relax. The TV displayed visions of men in golden robes holding down a majestic ram. Before I could reflect on the oddity of the programming choice, the suave Moroccan king, atypically dressed in a tradition Moroccan tajllabit (hooded robe), sauntered out to where the other men were, and from behind a white sheet, with a shaky but resolute one-handed motion, slit the ram’s throat. This was our sign. The rule is that you may begin the slaughter of your ram once the king has done the deed. Before long we were ushered out to a common field around which all the neighborhood people had gathered in their finest, most pearlescent cloths. People were taking turns walking around the giant circle of people greeting and being greeted. We fell in line greeting all our fancily clad neighbors and wishing them a happy holiday before being taken over to a lengthy impromptu photo session, for which, as it turned out, I was the photographer. After taking pictures of every possible mixture of people, a beautiful black ram was walked past us. I turned to find that the large common field was in fact full of rams. Probably 15 rams in all, some of them had already been slain, others were at this moment being coddled into their taking their final resting places. Though it was surprising to see so many animals being slaughtered in one place and time, I was not disgusted or disturbed as I thought I might be. These acts were celebratory and reverent, family-oriented, and shared with the whole community. Most of the families cared for their ram for months before this moment. And you can be sure, that in a country where meat is expensive and highly values, these creatures will not have died in vain. In fact, I now know that nearly every part of the animal is salvaged and utilized.
After the animal is dead, a slit is made in the skin near the ankle. Someone will plow into this hole until the skin puffs out like a balloon and separates from the muscle. Then the animal is skinned, starting at the base of the tail. At this point the animal is opened and fully cleaned, saving every organ including the colon. Only the digesting contents of the stomach and intestines are left to waste on the ground when the act is complete.
For the next two weeks or so, we continued to eat pieces of the rams we had seen off that day. One day we had the traditional “head couscous”, a meal which draws strong mixed emotions among PCVs and Moroccans alike. Though the skull was given to our host father to eat, I enjoyed the mild head-flavored couscous and vegetables in my section.
On another occasion, we were invited to a meat breakfast at the huge adobe compound shared by our host sister and the large family into which she was married. The meal started with sweet mint tea and the meat skewers mentioned above. Then, they brought out a tagine sloshing with indiscernible meat stew, laden with a vast variety of chunked meats, so that every bite was a new and surprising consistency. It was delicious! Exactly like menudo, though perhaps gamier; each bite transplanted me to a run-down café in Hatch, NM. Of course, in Morocco, the success of each meal greatly depends on the triangular section of the meal placed in front of you. That day, Amber’s section was visibly less appetizing, making us both wonder, “How many weeks are these rams gonna last”?