Crois-moi

Weekend in the mountains:

Many of the great experiences I have had in Morocco, condensed: trying new things, bartering, accepting invitations to tea, sharing, enjoying myself despite the absence of plumbing.

Out we went: a grand taxi driver named Ali with a United Nations baseball cap plus six of us in the car, backpacks full of food and a tent with no poles, a 10 Dirham saw for firewood. The air in the mountains is cool but the land is just as dry as the plains: scrubby, rocky, craggy heights and sharply-carved valleys. We drove out past Bir Tam-Tam (the end of the world, as far as Fassis are concerned), looking for a place called Taffert, pushed the car up a hill, and found our forest refuge. Ali, the refuge’s caretaker, called the owner for permission to let us stay; Faysal, our Moroccan friend and tireless translator, said that we were from the “Association of Peace:” magic words which got us a free place to sleep.

Tizi Boujabel, the nearest pass, was our first objective. We clambered up to survey the valley we’d conquered. The highest point wasn’t the rock we stood on but a cell phone tower, running on a generator and maintained by a Berber man who stays in a little room at its feet. He shared tea, bread, and honey, and we offered dried fruits and cookies.

Water bottles full at the icy Spring of Hunger not far from the refuge: they say its water increases your appetite. The drops of bleach we used to sterilize it against livestock droppings did not neutralize its power. The bud of an idea opened in all of our minds: buy a goat. Eat it.

Dinner by gas light, poems by star light, a fire on the lee side of the refuge to lull us all to sleep.

Visits from the authorities: the provincial governor, the local cops, forms to fill out, confirmations of our identities and intentions. They wanted to ensure our safety.

On the second day, a slow morning start, an aborted climb, ongoing discussion about this goat. We resolved to acquire one. Michael, Faysal and I lingered at the refuge all afternoon, but had to wait until evening to close the deal.

A bargaining party set out to a nearby douar. They dragged the goat uphill in the dark, walked it like a wheelbarrow, paraded it victoriously into the refuge. We took turns hugging it, lifting it, beaming, but didn’t waste too much time. It kind of sighed, over and over, after its head was off.

Next time you’re in a pinch with a dead goat you’re in a hurry to eat, call me. I can give you the step-by-step. Ali went about the job with pep, slicing and yanking and repeating, “C’est moi le docteur!” for comic relief. I think he stuck the esophagus in his mouth, puffed up the lungs and bugged out his eyes just to make us laugh. I think, when I prepare a goat carcass, I can omit that step.

The fire was built, the grilling began, and people materialized out of the woods while we crouched on logs and cinder blocks waiting for morsels. Rachid who helped us buy and prepare the goat, the man who sold it to us, Ali’s little brother, they all walk up mountains like it’s cake: in perfect darkness, wearing baseball caps and plastic shower shoes, with a bike or a dog, mish mushkila.

Liver, lungs, kidneys, testicles, leg meat, rump meat and heart: by 2 AM we had tried it all – with a little salt and cumin – and groaningly refused another bite. Despite the witness borne by its head forgotten on the porch and its skin hanging from a tree, the goat had won.

The next morning, the last one, I awoke still full and with mild fears that the Ali the driver wouldn’t come back for us, but he was good for his word and showed up early. After many goodbyes and last-minute negotiations we left with lighter bags and hearts, wended our way back towards civilization.

The whole way back I mulled over the marvel of our escape to Jebel Bou Iblane. I climbed my first mountain, sat on a plant that put thorns in my butt, drank from a spring, squatted and talked with local sidis… When we came down out of the mountains we cursed the heat, and when we came up into Fès we cursed the hubbub. Life in the Middle Atlas is hard, but the people’s warmth there had touched us. It’s a tough choice between the isolation of a mountainside and the overcrowdedness of an old medina, one I’m lucky not to have to make. When I got out of the taxi, though, the only thing I wanted to do was turn back.

The nature of my adventure is about to change. Tomorrow is my last day of class – a routine which has fooled me into taking daily maneuvering here for granted over and over – and then it’s off for more conventional adventure: hiking, traveling, meeting new people… the best word I’ve got right now is ” !يلله ”

This land of mystery has been gradually shedding its veils for me (just the thin, quasi-transparent outermost veils), and each new discovery has been the subject of long contemplation. I’ve learned how to get a taxi, how to say “How are you?” ten different ways (and how to respond to them all), how to make begging kids who don’t need the money scat, the fine art of refusal without the word ’no…’

Morocco has reserved some little mysteries for a later resolution, though. For instance, the mystery of the boys unrolling long spools of thread along the walls of certain buildings in the late afternoon; the mystery of the grocery store aisle full of tubes of plastic-wrapped meat; and the mystery of the little street-side peddlers selling what looks like rolled-up bark.

I crossed one mystery off of my list today, though: the fabled hammam, or Turkish bath. Catherine and I opted for a private, upscale place instead of an around-the-corner old city hammam (which would have been more colorful an experience). The first thing I saw when I walked in were the marble slabs upon which women were laying, being scrubbed. Thighs wobbled, water sloshed, and I had a jolt of recognition: I was in a Delacroix painting. I had joined his Bathers. We were herded around, slathered with brown-black soap from top to bottom, rinsed, and then sent off into the Vaporium, where a few other women were sitting in the steam. One of them was beating a little plastic dish with a good Moroccan rhythm that filled up the domed stone room. Catherine and I joked about being ready for the slip’n’slide, and later, on her way from chilly jacuzzi to marble slab she really did, right onto her butt.

When it was my turn to be scrubbed, a huge red-faced woman took me by the squishy part of my hip, indicated which slab was for me, and got scraping. I got a look at the lumps of grey skin scattered on the rock before she washed them away; it was hard to believe that I had been carrying around that much extra matter this whole time.

There was more: I marvelled at how completely at ease and warm everybody was while we were all naked and shiny, at the contrast between this openness and women’s demeanor in the street. In the locker room, I watched them come in and start unwrapping, unfolding, layer after layer, until they were just naked and nonchalant.

I thought about heat before I came here. I reviewed known battle strategies: iced beverages, high-powered fans, nibbles of chilled fruit and salad, the scantiest clothing permissible.

Those are Western daydreams, counterintuitive and irrelevant to Moroccan traditional wisdom. In Fes, there is the medina, built centuries ago by people who had endured hundreds of African summers, and there is the Ville Nouvelle, built by ‘civilized’ colonizers in the 20th century according to their temperate model. I probably don’t have to tell you which Fassis are more comfortable at noon in the middle of July.

This is how I learned that Morocco’s best weapon against heat is architecture. Narrow streets (no wider than two tightly-squeezed donkey carts) and high, flat, white walls with small windows maximize shady space in the medina. The more tunnel-like a street, the cooler it stays; and to be comfortable indoors, you want thick, white stone walls, high ceilings, central courtyard, and tile floors. Air circulates, the roof deflects the sun, and ground floor rooms stay pleasant throughout the day. When you step out of the street into a riad, you sigh with pleasure.

Our apartment, however, is at the top of a building with low ceilings and no cooling courtyard to help keep the air moving. Result: home is no respite from the heat.

My first few days here, tolerantly discovering new things about my body’s ability to sweat, I guzzled water and willed myself to acclimate. I looked to my host family for clues and discarded a lot of those conjectures I had dreamed up in a distant, drizzly French springtime.

The gist, grosso modo, is to tailor your behavior to maintaining a consistent, low-as-possible body temperature. How to do this?

SWEAT.

It’s easy.

When in Morocco…

• drink your tea boiling (not iced), with as much sugar and mint as you can handle
• cover your body, head to toe (Islam isn’t the only reason for this rule)
• dismiss foolish Western ideas of “light lunch:” prefer beef or chicken stew, or a bubbling tagine with lots of bread
• spend the afternoon horizontal, either on divans or the floor, sleeping and watching television, until the hottest part of the day is over

These guidelines generally guarantee steady perspiration, which turns that hot blast of air coming through the furnace, I mean window, into a sweet, cool breeze.

One of the drawbacks of being a Western girl in Morocco is the constant deluge of leering, cloying male attention. I call it a drawback because most of the time it’s an exhausting, uncomfortable pressure to feel like you’re perpetually being stared at, sized up, examined, etc. Sometimes, though, it can be a delight instead of a drawback: when this attention takes the form of ludicrous pick-up lines.

Pick-up lines are special because they come from ANYWHERE, all the time. Men have no problem stopping in their tracks to stare, leaning and gesticulating as they pass in a vehicle, whispering something as a girl goes by, or shouting across a crowded square. There are no rules and no obstacles to the man who wants to proclaim his interest.

Most of the things men say are uncreative. “Bonjour,” “Hello hi woman,” “You are beautiful,” etc. However, when the lines are good, they’re really good.

I thought I’d share this non-exhaustive list of gems which the men of Morocco have bestowed upon me and Catherine. Some of them kind of gross, but I have to give credit for creativity. There are a lot of things wrong with this kind of attention, but I confess, sometimes it’s really funny.

“Hello, Spice Girls!”

“I see you… as you are.”

“You want to meet my sister?”

“I’m gonna eat you like chewing gum.”

To me and Catherine: “Oh, lovely doubly!”

“MEOWMEOWMEOWMEOW!”

While looking for a cab: “Good mooorning. Are you looking for a husband?”

I’m forgetting a few now which I’ll add later, and I’m sure there are plenty more to come…

Umaima’s friend Duha invited us to meet her family, so Catherine and I bought three liters of soda and waited around at the appointed time to be escorted down the street to her house.

This house was BEAUTIFUL. A huge, old, beautiful, cool riad. A tour guide explained to me that in old medinas, it is hard to tell one door from another, and even when you open the door it will not be apparent what kind of house you are entering, because the street door is always walled off from the rest of the ground floor in order to give the ladies the time to cover themselves or get out of sight before a guest enters. Once through the street door and around the corner of the little foyer, though, we stepped into a big, square, white-walled garden with tiled walkways and big, velour-draped grand openings into the ground floor rooms.

We sat in the ‘welcoming room’ with the ladies of the house: Duha, her older sister Souad, and their mother. The TV was on, and Omar, their little brother, ran in and out with a shy grin on his face while we started the ball of small talk rolling. After a certain amount of time, the inevitable offer of cookies came, so we moved to a table in the courtyard. Our sodas were served, and then three big plates of cookies appeared. Catherine and I, remembering all of the warnings we had been given about not offending the Moroccan pride in hospitality, each served ourselves three or four cookies. I looked around. Everyone else had two. Souad’s mother said something to her. She nodded in my direction. Souad picked up one of the cookie platters, tipped it, and started dumping cookies on my plate. I launched into the “thankyou, thankyouthankyou” and waving of hands that I hoped would stop the cookie avalanche, but I ended up with ten-plus almondy horns and twirls mounded in front of me.

Catherine and I looked at each other. Did manners require us to eat all ten cookies AND drink our glasses of soda? We started in, chomping and exclaiming. Duha’s mother had made some biscotti-type things; we complimented her on them. We talked about language barriers, communication, Moroccan music. We were almost finished with our cookies! I looked at my plate, and realized that the last cookie on it was one of Mrs. Duha’s biscotti – would it insult her if I left hers for last, or think I was refusing to eat it? I glanced at Catherine for help, then shrugged and finished it off.

Duha’s mother suggested mint tea, offered to show us how to make it. We looked at each other. More sugar? I had mentioned that I like cooking, and Catherine and I both expressed enthusiasm for Moroccan food. Out came the tea pot, the fresh mint, the giant hunk of sugar.

More conversation, polite acceptance of refills. Had we heard of mlaoui? Yes, I think so, I saw it in the street– Duha’s mother makes some great mlaoui, they all told us. Oh, really? That’s great! Smiles, nods. A few minutes later, the question. Do we want to try some of her mlaoui? Oh, thank you, thank you, really, that’s very nice of you, we’re fine, don’t trouble yourselves, please. We had been told never to say no to a Moroccan person offering food, but we really didn’t want any fried rounds of dough after all of those cookies.

Out came the platter anyway, and Duha’s mother looked us in the eye and tossed a mlaoui on my plate. “Kul!” The command to eat, keep eating, delivered with utter conviction that we would soldier on. We were tearing little bits from the mlaoui, trying to stave off the offerings of food, working on the ebbing conversation, when someone finally suggested a visit of the house. Relieved, we got up and started exploring.

Later, Catherine and I discussed the Moroccan take on hospitality. This was not the first time we had been treated to such perplexingly overwhelming generosity with food, and we could tell that we still hadn’t acquired the tools to deflect it.

That night, when dinner was offered at home, we tried to explain how, really, we had already had a lot to eat that evening. We told Hamid the incredible story of the woman who served us mountains of cookies and then kept on going with sweet drinks and fried bread. Didn’t she know that it was way too much food for us? Did courtesy really require us to eat everything we were offered? It would be a long, greasy stay in Morocco if that was the case.

Hamid paused, laughed, and then explained Duha’s mother’s thinking. She took our conscientious dispatch of the cookie mountains as a sign that we were really, really hungry, so she brought on the tea. We dutifully drank it down, so she offered something else until finally it was apparent that her guests were satisfied.

Since then I haven’t been invited to any new houses, but I’m glad Hamid cleared up my bewilderment about that aspect of courtesy. I had been starting to feel a little nervous at the idea of visiting new people and being put in the same crossed-signals stand-off that would put me on the defense of my healthy blood sugar levels, but next time I am offered too many cookies, I’ll do what I should have done from the get-go, before I got swept away by concerns about my hosts’ perception of my behavior: I’ll do what feels good.

HOW I WEANED MYSELF FROM COFFEE

Catherine characterized our 4th of July by “some fireworks of my own with which to celebrate our day of independence: travellers’ diarrhea.” It was the weirdest thing: Catherine, Umaima and I were all a little sick, and we deduced that the neon green “pistachio” ice cream we had eaten from a store in the medina called The Disney Channel was probably the culprit.

I had been feeling a little off, on and off, for a few days, but with no serious red flags. Then, all of a sudden on Wednesday, after I had spent the morning writing home and talking about how much better I felt, I came down with a crazy fever and started feeling swoony and bizarre. I asked the people at ALIF to take me to the doctor and ended up being hospitalized for severe dehydration! All of this after I had thought I was doing a good job of drinking water, etc… but I think I had been too convinced of my invincibility, and didn’t ask for help soon enough, and so I landed in the clinique.

They put me on an I.V. I drifted in and out all afternoon. Catherine appeared in the evening with energy, a smile and a change of clothes, but I was still rather zonked, so she just stayed over with me on the guest bed in my room while I tottered back and forth from my bed to the bathroom with the I.V. and its meters of tubing.

The Moroccan hospital was totally satisfactory in terms of the care it provided. I have always wondered whether the little nurse call button that you see in TV hospital shows really exists (it does). There were little color-coded sockets on the walls that said “AIR” and “OXYGENE.” I even had a little closet and a chest of drawer (one drawer – with a rock in it!). There were lots of nice female nurses who came and went, speaking smiling, lightspeed Moroccan and a few words of French. In the evening, a pair of male nurses charged in, one in sea-foam scrubs, with hat and all, in a color remarkably close to that of the toxic pistachio ice cream. He charmed Catherine with his smile and his jocular French, while his colleague in a white doctor’s coat seemed a little more inhibited by language and perhaps our gender and manner of dress (by this point I was sprawled carelessly across the hospital bed in my shirt and a pair of boxers). They swept around and checked on everything, McGreeny offered to put our bottles of water in a fridge and flashed us more smiles than necessary, and then they wished us good night.

In the morning I was given three squares of dried-out whole wheat bread and a glimmer of hope: they told me that I was soon to be set free. Then everybody left and didn’t tell me any more about this promised release. Towards the end of the morning, half of my host family showed up and worked their magic with the staff to get the I.V. extracted from my hand.

After that I returned home with the fam and commenced a three-day recovery, highlighted by nasty-tasting intestinal medication and a slow, tentative reacquaintance with solid food. As of today, I am back in class and back in action. I hadn’t realized how much that sickness had taken out of me until I felt GOOD again. Lhamdulillah!

Golden moments in the Sunset Country, or Hamid’s good (but not perfect) English: “It is hot as the hell today.” and “I saw two of your friends down there, yeah! I thoughts they were Moroccan, and then they started talking. They were crazy! They have your sickness, speaking like you!”

The other night I did laundry with Umaima, Moroccan host sister, and Catherine, American host sister.

To do laundry, we needed two giant buckets, a little scoopy dish, two kinds of soap, a little vinyl bath mat, and a broom. Umaima advised us to put on shorts and bring bottles of water. Then we went up to the roof.

First, we swept away the grit and pigeon poo from an 8×8 square of rooftop. Umaima tossed water over it and gave it another brushing, and then we knelt down on our little vinyl mat and started soaping, scrubbing, and slapping our clothes on the stone. It was a good opportunity to practice our Arabic (”Give me water,” “Give me soap,” “It’s really hot,” “This is difficult”) and to bond with Umaima, who is the only girl in the family since her mother passed away.

At first, we were all in high spirits. We searched for a song that all three of us could sing together while we worked, and all we came up with was, “Ooh ee, ooh ah ah, ching, chang, walla walla bing bang.” Then the sun went down, and we got tired of lugging more and more buckets of water up the steps to the roof, and started really appreciating washing machines. In the end, though, we agreed to keep washing our clothes this way, since that’s how our family does it.

FIRST HOURS IN MOROCCO, a flashback:

Long line at the border, two Canadian girls eating pita on the train from Casa airport to Casa Voyageurs. My sheepish French and ears straining to understand the Arabic around me (nope).

I had to switch trains in Casablanca, where ticket lines were long and I witnessed and, somehow, was included in a little quarrel between an official and a bunch of heckling ladies who were complaining that not enough ticket booths were open. One of the ladies offered to accompany me to the right train, patting me on the arm and smiling like a doting grandma, but when I bought my ticket the man in the booth said, “C’est celui-la, dépêchez-vous.” I turned, scared, imagining the train leaving while I helped my little old lady to the platform; waiting for hours for the next one; falling asleep in the interval and having all of my stuff stolen; taking a late train to Fes with nothing but my passport and the clothes on my back; wandering a deserted, sleeping, unfamiliar, unsavory train station neighborhood; being forced to hole up in a dingy, stinky hotel… But as I swung around, panicked, my little old lady was capering off through the crowd and leaping onto the train, with just one backward glance and “hurry up” gesture to encourage me. I just made it.

Through the train’s windows, everything is bright light and bright colors. Flowers, dust, apartment buildings, sky. Ladies wrapped from head to toe and carrying things down a path through the dusty fields, their clothes fluttering.

A woman in my compartment has farted loudly a few times with no reaction from anyone. Her husband has spent the whole trip talking on his cell phone and working on the first Arabic crossword I’ve ever seen.

Trash, skinny livestock. People just sitting out in the middle of the scrub. These well-dressed young Moroccan men intrigue me. I want to talk to the girl next to me; I tried; I asked a stupid question. Out the window, nothing but coastline, but I whispered, “Nous sommes près de la mer ici?” She gave me an indulgent smile.

Fig trees, lemons, oranges. So many satellite dishes! Everybody has a bottle of water. Now is the time for me to put my confidence in action, to remember to say “b’s’laaama” when I leave, despite my nervousness and wibbly accent. It took me a long time to resolve to eat my apple earlier because I wasn’t sure whether it would be appropriate to eat it without sharing. I just stood in the corridor and chomped it by myself.

The well-dressed young Moroccan’s name is Jamal, and the nice-looking girl next to me is Amina. We finally started talking to each other after a pack of boys at one of the stops threw rocks at our train, surprising us all. They both gave me their phone numbers and invited me to meet their families. Jamal helped me find a good hotel and left me with his good wishes. Such nice ambassadors of their country, such a nice first day in this place that feels very foreign, but thanks to them, very welcoming.

Ana fil Maghreb, little duckies.

I’m here, I made it, I’m struggling with my limited vocabulary and sweating out my bottled water just as fast as I can buy it!

My classes here are great. The first day I was here, I was too dazzled by everything to string two Arabic words together, and yesterday I worked some Arabic into my French, but today I’ve just started pretending not to understand any English or French people throw at me. I’ve only found a couple of other students here who are making an effort to speak Arabic to each other, but that’s probably because it’s tough to say much before your fourth or fifth semester… even so, that’s what I came all this way for, so I’m just gonna set my frustration aside and DO IT.

One big plus is my host family. I have a host sister, Umaima, who is twelve, and two host brothers, Amin and Hamid. There is another brother, Mehdi, but he lives in Marrakech and it is unlikely that I will meet him. Then there’s the dad (whose name I don’t know), the grandmother (who roasts a delicious chicken), three little birdies, and Aris.

Who’s Aris? This is the little mischief-maker himself (puppy lovers in my life, this is for you):