Life in a Moroccan Family

            This post will be shorter than the last, but it should give you an idea of what the typical day in my life is here, so much as there is a typical day.  One of the three primary goals of the Peace Corps is to introduce Americans to how life is lived abroad, so this will be my attempt to tell ntuma (Darija for ya’ll) about how life is lived in a typical Moroccan family.

            I wake up every morning around 7.  The first couple of days the morning call to prayer (sobh) was a problem, but now I sleep through the 4:30 call, just like all the Moroccans.  Thus far I have yet to see anyone pray at the prayer times.  After the early evening call I sometimes see men in djebblas (traditional Moroccan robes) head for the mosque, but I don’t know if they’re going to pray or to socialize at the near-by café or hammam (or at the mosque, for that matter).  I’ve seen my host brother pray a couple of times, and another time, at a party last Sunday (more on that later) all the men prayed together.  Other than the habitual invocations of God that pepper speech here, Inshallah (God willing), Labas hamdullah (I’m fine, thanks to God), Bismillah (in the name of God, used to start any activity, most often it works as Bon Appetit) and the call to prayer, religion doesn’t visually affect the everyday life of a Moroccan person any more than it does the life of a secular American.  This doesn’t surprise me, it was very similar in Turkey and across large swathes of the Arab and Islamic world, but Americans tend to think of all Islamic countries as fundamentalist, which is, of course, about as far from true as possible.  Across a lot of America the average American is much more ostentatious about their faith than the average Moroccan.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  In either direction.

            When I wake up about half my host family is already up.  I usually have just enough time to wish my older host brother good luck in school (in English because he’s practicing for his Bac, the Moroccan test that seems like a mutant hybrid of British A-Levels and the SAT.  One of his subjects is English).  My oldest host sister, who is about my age, is usually getting ready for work.  The sister between them goes to a school that starts later and works late after that, so she’s still asleep, as is my youngest brother.  My youngest host sister is usually up, we warm each other up for the day by quizzing each other on words in the other’s language, colors or numbers or foodstuffs.  My host mother is up and has already laid out the morning spread, various types of bread, olive oil, butter, jam, and the ubiquitous sweet mint tea.  Actually, she makes hers with shiva, which, if I’m not mistaken, are the leaves from the star anise plant.  It’s not quite as fresh tasting as the mint, but makes for a nice, sturdier tea.  The real amazing thing is the variety of bread.  I’ve almost got their names all memorized.  Most of them I’ve never seen before in the States.  The range of consistencies and flavors is astounding.  My favorite is hamel, a doughy flat bread.  Sometimes my host mother cooks eggs.  Her signature dish is an open face omelet (made with eggs, milk, and olive oil) that she sprinkles copious amounts of cumin over.  It’s incredible.

            During breakfast the T.V. is already on.  In fact, it’s always on.  Most of the time we watch the children’s channel (my youngest host brother is nine), which I don’t mind since I can actually follow some of the easier shows (most of them are Disney and Nickelodeon imports that are either dubbed or have Arabic subtitles).   Oftentimes it’s tuned to the football channel.  The rest of the time its either Arabic or Turkic soap operas, except for when its Moroccan Idol.  My host family doesn’t really watch the T.V., they just have it on in the background.  The exceptions are football and Moroccan Idol, which they watch religiously.  A lot of the time they’re actually focusing on the radio, with the T.V. as ambient light in the background.  Speaking of which, my host sisters have been telling me the names of Moroccan pop artists I’ve liked, so you can try some of these people out.  I make no promises about the spelling of the English transcriptions and can’t give you song names, but give youtube, itunes, or spotify a shot with these guys.  My favorite is Adil Maloudi, a Moroccan man who often sings with women and traditional Moroccan instrumentation backing his auto-tuned pop grooves.  Dahwdi Abdullah is similar, but with more western instruments mixed in.  My favorite women singers (who tend to be more oriented towards the Western pop with interesting backing rhythm end of the genre) are Najatataba, from Morocco, Dalila, from Algeria, and Njwakara, from Lebanon.

            After breakfast I go to language lessons at the Dar Chebab.  It’s a short walk through a part of the neighborhood with open spaces so you can see beyond the community.  The neighborhood has great views of the hilly terrain covers the area Fes, which is beautiful.  Unfortunately, while Moroccans are very cleanly in their homes they don’t have an adequate amount of public dumpsters and trashcans, so they leave their trash in public places.  In the parts of my neighborhood close to the municipal dumpsters it is very clean, but that’s more than a ten minute walk from my path to the Dar Chebab and there are no public trashcans between the two locations, or for another ten or twenty minutes in the other direction.  It’s a huge problem.  One of our plans for an activity at the Dar Chebab is a community cleanup day, though the Mudira (supervisor) of the Dar Chebab says that when they’ve done those in the past it doesn’t stay clean for very long.  There are just too many people for the amount of trash receptacles.

            Four hours of brain grinding language lessons later I go back home for lunch.  Lunch is the big meal of the day in my family, which is traditional.  In my training group the families are split, about half keep lunch the largest meal, the other half have switched to dinner as the main meal.  I like the change, though its going to make it hard to learn to cook the delicious Moroccan food since I’m never home when my host mother cooks.  Usually she pulls some amazing concoction out of a tagine.  Today’s lunch was chicken with ful and artichokes all cooked together in saffron.  I’m not quite sure what ful are, they look kind of like giant peas, but they taste more like beans.  They’re very tasty.  A couple of days ago we had lamb with homemade French fries cooked in the lamb juices.  Another day we had a whole roast chicken stuffed with shareia chinois, which is a traditional noodle dish spiced with ginger, saffron, paprika, coriander and garlic made “chinois” by preparing it with thin rice noodles.  We eat with our right hands and bread as utensils.

            Once lunch is over I go back to the Dar Chebab, where we sometimes continue language lessons, sometimes have cross-cultural training and sometimes meet local officials.  We’re also starting to practice our Darija with locals.  Today in one of the cafés I met a kid in his teens wearing a leather jacket, smoking a cigarette, drinking a black coffee, and playing the guitar.  He played the same cocktail of classic rock songs that kids in America learn, Sweet Child of Mine, Tears From Heaven, Yesterday.  Some things are the same the world over.  Earlier in the day my teacher had asked about my ocarina, so I happened to have it on me; the kid and I played together a bit, between songs we spoke in Darija as much as I could.  Around 5:30 or 6 I head home, usually just in time for snack, more bread and jam, occasionally salad or cookies (and once fried fish!) as well.  Usually this is the time when I unwind, practice new language with my hosts, listen to music with my siblings, play cards or checkers, write these posts, etc.  Around 9 or 9:30 we have dinner.  Dinner is usually just leftovers from lunch.  Most days a family member or family friend joins.  One uncle comes very often.  Whenever he walks in the door I run to grab my notebook, because I know I’ll be learning a whole slew of new words.  Over the next few hours we slowly drift off to sleep, I usually retire to my room around 11 or 11:30 after the youngest children have passed out.

            So that’s the average day, though once in awhile there’s a bit more to it.  Last Sunday, for example, my host mother hosted a huge party for family and friends.  I think this is a more or less weekly occurrence, as I know we’re planning on going to a cousin’s for something similar this week.  At the party I got to see a few cultural things I’d heard about, but not seen, in practice.  As the guests came in they all took off their shoes before walking on the rugs, once inside they immediately started to greet people individually, starting to the far right of the room and going through one by one to the left.  Since there were at least 25 people this was no small feat by the time most people were there.  The sexes were segregated with the women on one side of the room and the men on the other, the children played in another room.  Despite sitting apart everyone talked together, but when the food came out it was served on two separate tables, one for each sex.  This was the day we ate the roast chicken and shareia, though it was followed by a second entrée of lamb.  It was a pretty fun day; at one point I was hanging out with the older children and young adults and taught them a bunch of American card games.  They really liked Egyptian Ratslap (my host brother and I have played almost every day since, he’s getting dangerously good).

            Alright, I think that’s enough for now, since I’m sure my next post will be huge; next time I write I’m sure I’ll have visited the Fes medina (my host sister was going to take me after the party, but it ran really late and was raining very heavily at the time we would have left).  I’ll leave you with a Joha story since I haven’t in awhile.  This one’s coming from memory, so I’ll do my best to get it right.

            There was a day when everyone in town realized that Joha owed them some money.  They saw him in the souq and approached him as a mob.  Joha ran home and told his wife not to let anyone in, since he could not pay off all his debts at once.  He then hid upstairs in their bedroom.  The mob came up to his door and demanded that his wife let them in.  “We saw Joha enter this house, he must be here,” they said.

            Hearing this Joha threw the bedroom window wide open and yelled to the mob, “I could have gone out the back!”