Village Stay

(The Village stay is a weeklong excursion where we all go live with Berber families in the rural part of the country. The dichotomy between rural and urban life is very important to the dynamics of Moroccans, but also an important thing for us to experience on this trip. The city we were in was called Oulmes and we all stayed with families that lived miles outside the city because they were all farmers and shepherds. We were ensured we would probably be very sick because of the new environment and the new food, and that it might snow. Basically, I was really not looking forward to this before I left…)
But believe it or not, the village stay was beyond great! Overall, it was more like a bi-polar/rollercoaster-esk change of emotion from misery to pure glee. But, the important thing is that the majority of the time we were on the very happy end. I’ve never experienced a 6-day period that felt like months. We were all supposed to be split up into groups of two in each house but mine and Leah’s family and Liz and Camille’s family were really the same group of people so we were all 4 together the entire time. That was one of the biggest reasons the whole experience was so great— because we got to do it together. If I had been by myself I would have probably cried every night, and even if it was just me and Leah, it would have been much harder. But the power of 4 was awesome. So I don’t really know how to tell this very long story because there are just so many components! I’ll just start with the family:
Family dynamics:
This was a very bizarre set-up and it took us the entire time to figure it all out (we actually still don’t know who one man was and where he fell into the picture) Ok so Leah and my “parents” were technically one of the sons and his wife who still live on the same family compound because he’s the shepherd of the sheep and goats and that’s the “family business” aka the only way the entire family makes any money as far as I could tell. And Liz and Camille’s technical “mom” was my grandma. Ok so grandma Fadma is considered the leader of the house and this is very uncommon in Morocco—for a woman’s name to be the name that represents the entire family. This only happens when she is a widow. (We later found out that her husband died in 2000.) Anyway, she has 6 children. The the oldest son Mohammad was in his mid to late 30s and we didn’t meet him until the last day. He lives “in the city” (which is about 4 miles away from our farm house in the middle of nowhere) Mohammad is quote, “a lot, a lot, a lot Islam” meaning he’s a very religious person and had apparently gone to Mecca three times and we were told over and over, before we met him that he speaks English and French and Spanish, which, believe it or not, ended up only being partially true. His English was enough to get him by but it was still easier for him to communicate in French with Liz. Anyway, he asked us what we think of Muslims and why there were women fighting in Iraq and WHY have so many people died there? That was the point in which I got up and walked away so that’s the end of my personal story about Mohammad. (We surprisingly delt with a lot of anti-American and anti-Bush hostility in Oulmes—a LOT more than I’ve experienced in Rabat. Although, on the contrary, the people of Oulmes were also the most hospitable and most friendly people I’ve met in Morocco as well…?)
The second child is Haammi (maybe short for Mohmmad?) and this is my father. He was so so so great. I think he’s about 32 and is married to Jemila (that means beautiful in Arabic) and they have a 3 year old daughter named Mona. They were really great although they only spoke the Berber language and we couldn’t really talk to them one on one. Mona will get her own section in a bit but Haammi was such a great father with her and that was very refreshing to see! Jemila though, we didn’t even meet until day 2 because she never came into the main family room (the house consisted of 2 rooms: the sitting/sleeping/eating room and the kitchen). This was obviously not because she was shy, but because she was married into the family not a first person member. That ended up being such an interesting dynamic actually. Especially because she and Haammi are living on the land that she will probably be the ruler of one day if she out lives him. She’ll eventually be the Fadma of that exact house because the rest of the siblings will marry off and move away, yet at this point in her life she’s more treated like the hired help.
Next is Fatiha, maybe about 30, who is married and has 3 young boys. They also live in the city and we spent a few evenings there and they live a life in a very different, higher social class than the rest of her family. They have couches, a car, satellite TV, a western toilet, and a washing machine—all the while 7 other family members plus the four of us used the bathroom on the back wall of the house. Her husband Achmed (no idea how to spell these names in English) was the man who picked us up on the first night and he spoke a little French so that was nice for communication reasons. As a profession, he’s a driver and apparently just uses his big, very old, very broke down van to escort people to and from the city and this makes five times as much money as herding sheep.
So next in line is the infamous Moujub who we ended up detesting in many ways. He spoke “Spanish” which was also nice for communication reasons but in reality he did not actually speak Spanish. It was awful and even I could recognize that, and my Spanish is also awful grammatically. He learned Spanish when he was in Spain for 2 years as an illegal immigrant. He only came back because he got deported. “Mucho policia” hahah. So in his defense, he probably speaks perfect immigrant worker conversational Spanish; but he didn’t understand anything we said to him. Ok, so at this point I’m just so frustrated at him and icked out I’m probably being unfair. It was nice to have some Spanish to enable us to talk to the rest of the family and we did benefit from that in a lot of ways. Anyway, he’s a big 27 year old baby who doesn’t work or do anything except follow us around for the week we were there. I’m not sure what he’ll do now that we’re gone.
So then there’s Wardia who is the 22 year old daughter who does everything for the entire household. She spoke French so was able to communicate with Liz and we all became pretty close to her. She was so sweet and cooked the bessssst food!! But she and Jemila work so hard—just like most people in these villages—and so often I felt so bad for her because she pretty clearly expressed her own frustration with the situation. She has absolutely no freedom and can never leave the house without a male family member with her. There is an arranged marriage waiting for her if she wants. It’s a Moroccan man who lives in Germany and when they meet, if she wants they’ll get married and move to Germany. So she’ll get to go to Rabat and learn German first and then hopefully go to some type of college as well. This would be amazing for her but when this will happen no one knows. I just hope it does if that’s what she wants. (I also think seeing the 4 of us was an especially encouraging experience for her—I hope so anyway) So yes, I feel very very lucky to be me and have the opportunities I do. We once started having a conversation about what the 4 of us wanted to do after college and options are so unlimited, but explaining that to them was a very foreign concept. Although, how awful is it that her best option for her life is an arranged marriage with a man she’s never met?! That’s another story, huh…
Lastly there’s Lubna who we think is 13. She’s adorable and became pretty obsessed with us—especially our cameras. She also does a lot of work like Wardia and Jemila but she also goes to school during the day so isn’t at home as much. We went to visit her school one day and the classrooms, for being a rural schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere, weren’t half bad. The two classrooms in the building were actually just a step nicer then the classrooms I had in Costa Rica. Lubna also loved playing the game thumper that we taught them the first night and then pretty much never STOPPED playing for 6 days! She wasn’t very good, and asking any of them for some rhythm was out of the question, but we did have a lot of fun playing games with them.
So now I have to go back to little Mona who was just so adorable, so dirty and somehow never cold even when we were shivering under 3 large wool blankets. Her life is really fascinating. It’s beyond different from the average 3 year old in America and even very different from an urban child in Morocco. She is given so much freedom it was scary to us! We pulled her away from blazing fires, away from the edge of the roof and made sure she didn’t eat dirt (that very very easily could have actually been the feces of a human or any animal). She actually inspired me to possibly do my final ISP paper on the life of a 3 year old in Morocco. As for being a female, she was surprisingly not subservient nor very obedient which was kind of funny, but ended up being a pain as well.
There was also a man who we thought was grandpa but Fadma’s husband/the father of all her children died in 2000. I really doubt she has remarried but there’s really no other reason for this man to be around. It’s a mystery that was never solved. He was really nice and adorable though. The whole family was really quite great and I even teared up saying good bye to them! I won’t even KIND OF be sad saying goodbye to my family in Rabat (they hardly acknowledged me when I got back on Friday, and I’ve learned enough Arabic at this point to know they refer to me as “the girl”… so loving!) Anyway, my village family was really great and they were just so so so nice. I learned so much more from this one week than from my entire other homestay combined. They said over and over that we were welcome back anytime. They even said we should bring our families and they would slaughter a goat in our honor. (This was told to us via sign language as well… hahaha) Fadma told us over and over that we were like 4 more daughters to her. They just really, genuinely enjoyed having us and we were equally as happy to be there. It was a nice change of pace, that’s for sure!
FOOOOD:
Food on this trip was what was supposed to give us the never ending diarrhea. But I think no one was ever really sick, no one in our house definitely ever was! And, to top it off, the food was fantastic!!! First of all, they made all of their bread obviously, and there were like 5 different types! (As it is in all of Morocco bread is your utensil so it’s a key component to any meal.) There was some fried, some more corn-meally, some just plain, my personal favorite was like a big, soft, thick and buttery tortilla. Anyway, it was all just so great. The couscous on this trip was also fantastic and somehow was just sooo much better than the other couscous I’ve had here. We also had rice pudding when it was really cold and the mint tea, Berber style, had an extra herb that made it extra amazing. The only downfall to the food (but this is not unique to rural life) was the immense amount of sugar used in EVERYTHING. It’s scary how much sugar they go through actually. What they don’t use is salt, so they don’t have issues with sodium, but they more than make up for that in the diabetes I’m sure all old people have.
Day by day play black:
So this whole program in Oulmes was affiliated with a local association in town called Anwar—this was our meeting ground, and where our two advisors stayed. We arrived there on Saturday afternoon and had a welcoming lunch and tea. This town was so so so excited to have us there. They were very hospitable and there were so many people from the town there awaiting our arrival. There were many introductions—including making all 26 of us introduce ourselves in Arabic!—and a lot of local people did their best to introduce themselves in English which I thought was so noble! It would be hard to get up in front of a group of young Americans and speak their native language that you were very new at learning. I was impressed. I also felt so welcomed it was very nice.
One of the biggest things our academic advisor said to us before we left was to think about not only what we are getting out of this town for our own learning benefit, but what this town is getting from us. We don’t want to be a nuisance but we also want to make sure they are housing us and hosting us because they genuinely want to. He also mentioned that we really are the last generation that will be able to have the opportunity to see what it’s like to live without any of the technology we are so used to in our everyday lives. Even in this small town, only 3 of the 13 houses we all stayed at didn’t have electricity or a toilet (I was of course in one of those 3 but I loved it and am grateful I got to really experience life that way). But even in my house, several people even had cell phones! So this lifestyle without any contact to the outside world is coming to a close and I’m really glad I got to see it first hand before it’s obsolete.
I mentioned this because I wanted to say that during our introduction time at the association, 8 different cell phones went off during that one hour. And none of them were ours! I thought that was just so surreal and it really spoke to what our AD was saying before we left. I was assuming I was being sent to this Podunk village where everyone lived in straw huts... and I was massively wrong. Even in the poorest communities cell phones WILL haunt groups of people trying to have a polite meeting. Hahaha
So then we took a small group tour of the city itself. It’s very very small town—simply made up of about 5 square blocks and then a large unfinished housing project where some houses were finished and people were living in them and some were not. I think it was the kind of thing where people spend years and years—sometimes decades—to build a house for themselves; just waiting for more money to come in to add on slowly. Within these projects is where the sister Fatiha lived with her family and their house was definitely finished and very nice, but she lived directly next to vacant lots.
Then we got picked up by our families and my dad, Haammi came and got 6 of us (Sarah S. and Sarah L. lived with our neighbors so they were part of our little group as well from time to time). We drove in Achmed’s car down some very dark windy roads and arrived and our family was so thrilled to see us. We sat around and played music and danced and chatted for hours, I was just so happy and comfortable there—I was shocked I felt this way because I expected the opposite effect! But it was lovely.
So Sunday morning we woke up before 7 because that’s when the rooster and the sheep wake up and Wardia and Moujub took us on a walk around the land and there was such a beautiful view! You could see into the valley and across the mountains for miles! It was very very gorgeous. They told us about these caves that exists down in the valley so we decided to try go on a little hike to find them. Welllll that little hike turned in to a 5 ½ hour hike which wasn’t too bad going down. But coming up was another dreadful story that I have tried to block out of my memory. I’m just not one for hiking in the first place but it was a beautiful day that was cool enough that we never got hot but never too cold either. Overall, it was a great way to spend the morning even though we never made it all the way to the caves themselves because they forgot to mention you needed to literally rock climb to get there and we thought falling to our death on the first day in the village wasn’t the way to go. We did get close to them and took photos… it was cool. When we got back we took a little nap—life on the farm is very simple and I do appreciate that! I can also understand going from being used to that every day to the big city would be a shocking experience. We also discovered today that baby goats are, by far, without a doubt, THE cuuuutest baby animal. (I later found out that baby donkeys are the ugggggliest baby animal.) This little goat though just pranced around and hopped and hopped and hopped. Adooorable.
Monday after breakfast our mom and sisters insisted we play dress up so they gave us their prettiest jalabas and kaftans that are only worn for special occasions and we took like a MILLLION photos. Hahaha but I was very nice of them and they were beautiful gowns! Then we went for a little walk and met Sarah and Sarah (there are 5 Sarahs on this trip by the way). They had also played dress up earlier that day but their new mamma didn’t really think of is as game so much as a reality. They had to wear jalabas everyday and couldn’t wear their tennis shoes and got hennas and wore traditional Berber makeup every day. AAHAHAHA it was hilarious but they were really good sports and didn’t mind at all so they definitely got pared with the right family. At 3 pm we had to walk the 2-3 miles into town for part of our program at the association. It was good to see everyone and find out how their home stays were going. The planned program for the day was to chat with locals of the town and high school students and just have a dialog with them about culture, language etc. but what it turned into was a “we hate America party” which, I’ll just say, was not very fun. It actually put me in a horrible mood. They asked very difficult and sometimes absurd questions ranging from “what do you think of Arabs” to “Why is your government giving arms (specifically tanks and missiles) to Israel to KILL Palestinians?” I don’t know!! I didn’t vote for George Bush! First of all, none of us were of age to vote in the last election and we wouldn’t have voted for him anyway! I couldn’t beeelive it. Ok so it’s important to note that this was a Berber village, so they don’t speak Arabic and don’t consider themselves Arab. This issue over ethnicity is a very big one in Morocco right now and there seems to be a pretty apparent ethnic battle of Berber v. Arabs throughout the county in different degrees. So these people, who are not Arab, were also kind of offended that we came to Morocco to study Arabic not their Berber language because that’s “what is really native to Morocco.” Anyway, I was glad to get out of there because it got a little bit too heated for those circumstances. That night we got henna done on our hands and I was so grateful we got pretty designs and not the traditional Berber henna which is just the entire palm covered like you were finger painting with bright orange paint. Almost everyone else got that traditional henna which is so heinous. But ours was nice and pretty with lots of flowers J
Tuesday is souk day in Oulmes. Souk just means market in Arabic and most small towns like this just chose one day of the week for lots of vendors to set up shops and sell things. Places like Rabat don’t really have a souk once a week because there is pretty much a souk everyday because the city is so big and the medina is always hoppin. It was in a souk that I thought I was going to be trampled to death a few weeks ago when I went to the waterfalls but this time it wasn’t nearly as crowded. BUT it also happened to be an awful awful rainy, cold AWFUL day outside. In the end, we survived but souk day sucked! We were all given a little money from our program to buy our family gifts. So we were there long enough to spend our money and we bought them lots of great things. But it was pouring rain and the ground turned into this awful muddy mess that my tennis shoes were not cut out for. We finally told our sister we had to leave because we just couldn’t take any more but then of course… we still had the 3 mile walk back to the house! This is another moment I’ve kind of blocked out of my memory but we were all just so so so cold and miserable we wanted to cry. But of course, there was no possibility for a ride back so we did have to trek it and walk back. By the time we made it back the rain kind of slowed and inside our house a big, warm pot of coals was waiting in the living room to warm our toes. And they served us delicious rice pudding and all of a sudden we didn’t hate Morocco once again. This is a great example of the rollercoaster effect I was talking about: we went from suicidal misery to absolute bliss in a matter of minutes! Later that night we gave the family our bundle of gifts we bought and they were so grateful and so happy! It was a very good idea for SIT to have us buy gifts for them because they just loved it!
With souk day behind us, we woke up Wednesday and had this amazing fried bread for breakfast that was like carnival bread with lots of sugarJ Then we went with our SIT group again and went to the Sidi Ali factory. Sidi Ali is the brand of every water bottle in the entire country and this factory is one of the only, if not the only, huge mechanized factory in the entire country so it’s a big deal to the community and factories are so cool so I was glad we went. So that was the highlight of that day but that night I experienced the worst night of sleep, maybe in my entire life. Our sleeping situation is this: In the big room, where everyone sleeps, we have a sheep skin per person laid down on the ground then a big blanket over that, then on top of us we have three big wool blankets. So first of all sleeping on the cement floor, even with the warm sheepskin underneath us is awful and very very uncomfortable. (I missed my couch in Rabat so much!) But it was also very cold this night and Leah somehow stole all the heavy blankets. So even though I had 3 layers of clothes on, I was freezing to death. It was awful and I was glad for the day to come.
Thursday was our last full day there and we woke up and it was actually pretty sunny so we wondered around with the sheep for awhile then took a blanket up on the roof and sat in the sun and read for a few hours. Then we had lunch and it was couscous again because they knew we loved it. We were served the biggest bowl/mountain of couscous I’ve ever seen! It was enormous!! But delicious, too! Then we walked to Lubna’s school where we ended up just being a distraction. Although we got to see the classrooms and the kids, we didn’t actually get to really see a class in action because our being there obviously outweighed the necessity to learn hahaha. So we had to leave in order for them to actually have class, but it wasn’t too bad. It was nice to see the school at all.
So another thing to mention is the fact that the view of the stars at night was one of the most incredible views I‘ve ever seen! On a clear light, with no light pollution, I could have stayed out there for hours! It was so beautiful!
Friday morning we woke up, had breakfast and got picked up around 10:30. I was so sad saying goodbye, but at the same time we were so ready to leave. Not only had we not showered in a week, we hadn’t washed our faces either and I just felt icccccky. We did get to brush our teeth with water bottles every day thank goodness although our family thought it was a very bizarre concept. I was also tired of being perpetually cold and I’d been wearing every pair of socks I owned—needless to say I wanted to take them off after a full week of never doing so.
So the moral of this story was that the village stay has probably been the highlight of this trip for me. I now appreciate toilets in a big way, but also understand that they aren’t the necessity I once thought. I feel that way about a lot of things really. This family hardly produces waste in any form and they are also so loving and their family dynamics fascinate me. And although many times I was very cold, at least it didn’t ever snow!!!