Or, in
Darija, l-li bgha l-asl y-sbr l qris
n-nhl. It’s a bit of Moroccan wisdom
from our textbook I’ve been thinking about a lot these last few days. It strikes me as very apropos of life in the
Peace Corps (perhaps why they put it in the book). While there is plenty of “honey” in the form
of successful lessons, interesting interactions, and the amazing act of living
in Morocco there is also the ever-present risk of “bee stings:” frustrations
with language, occasional exhaustion, and fairly constant confusion. Ok, that last one can be honey too, depending
on the situation, there’s nothing quite like a misunderstanding that leads to a
new discovery. These last eleven days
have had both honey and stings, though thankfully much more of the former.
The day
after my last post overflowed with milk and honey without a bee in sight. One of my host cousins (the relationship is
more complicated, but cousin works) and his friend, who are both law students,
took a couple of the other volunteers and me around the Fes medina. Just like in the U.K, law students start to
study law during undergrad, so my cousin and his friend are a year or two
younger than us volunteers. Like most of
the Moroccan university students I’ve met who don’t study English, they think
their English is a lot worse than it is.
It is a whole lot better than my Darija.
Ironically, since I’m saying this, one language hurdle we had to jump
over was their course of study; they had never learned the English word for
law. My smattering of French comes in
handy again.
They
started our tour in the Bou Jeloud gardens, a beautifully manicured garden that
remains pretty close to how it looked when it was first laid out around the
year 1200. As with my other more
touristy post I’ll let the pictures do the talking. These gardens were actually built with the
part of the medina called Fes Jdida,
New Fes. It only seems new in comparison
to the older part, which was started in the late 700s. After we finished a spin around the gardens
we ventured into this super-millennial labyrinth. Just like in Rabat, the first thing that
struck me was how many Moroccans still live, work, and play in the medina, it’s
not so overrun with tourists that you don’t see locals, except at one or two of
the prettier gates. I also noticed that,
again like Rabat, the shops were a mixture of the chintzy, the traditional, and
the bootlegged. Despite these
similarities, the Fes medina puts the Rabat one to shame. I don’t know how much larger it is in terms
of area, but the Fes medina feels infinitely bigger, probably because the
alleyways are even tighter and more twisting and turning. When there is a roof over the street (which
happens fairly frequently) it’s usually much lower to the ground than in
Rabat. All in all, it gives the medina
the feel of a tunnel system, with the occasional open-air courtyard and
passage.
In the tight space, smells and
sounds come to the forefront. I noticed
the scent first. Since automobiles are
only allowed into very small areas along the edge of the medina the primary
forms of cargo transportation are handcarts and donkeys. Either one is wide enough to grind traffic to
a halt as everyone rushes to the side of the tunnel to clear a path. The smell of donkey dominates most of the passageways. This is actually a good thing, when donkey
and donkey droppings aren’t the predominant stench the most noticeable smell is
usually from the tanneries. My host
cousin took us up to the top of one of the numerous leather shops (all of which
sell high quality Fassi leather goods) where we were able to look down into the
tannery. The picture almost catches the
amazingly striking visual, but what was really incredible was the smell of the
tanneries. The tanning and dyeing
processes create a unique order that is easier to experience than to describe. I know this paragraph comes off sounding kind
of negative, but its not meant to be. I
came to the Fez medina for the full medieval experience, and the smell is a big
part of setting the mood!
Since the alleyways are so tight
and the roofs so low the medina quickly becomes one giant echo chamber. As you’d expect, there are a lot of Darija,
French, Spanish, and English words floating around. Also a fair amount of Italian and German, and
presumably other languages that I didn’t catch.
They all blend together with the sound of donkey hooves on pavement,
squeaking hand truck wheels, and of course the occasional call to prayer to
form an endless cacophony that again, more than anything else, adds to the
medieval appeal of the old city.
While there are a few sites in the
old city, the most important attraction is the medina itself. Later in my time in Morocco, either during
training or service, I’ll get a chance to swing by the supposedly fantastic
folk art museums, and some of the more out of the way madrassa-mosques (at
least the ones that let non-Muslims visit), but on this first trip the focus
was on the experience of the old city itself.
Other than the trip to the gardens and the top of the leather shop we
didn’t visit many sites. Most of our
time was spent exploring down one street or another, stopping at both tiny and
surprisingly gigantic shops, getting lost and finding ourselves (yes, even
Fassis like my host cousin get lost in the old medina). We did, of course, stop by the Kairaouine
mosque and university, possibly the oldest university in the world. It was founded in 859. Like all of the world’s oldest universities
it started as a religious institution and remains so, non-Muslims can’t do more
than glimpse through the gates at the voluminous courtyard of the
mosque-university complex. My host
cousin and his friend, following the lead of decades of tour guides, took our
cameras inside for us. Out of respect
for the spirit of the law I won’t plaster pictures of the mosque all over the Internet,
but if you’d like to see them feel free to e-mail me.
It was a long afternoon of
sightseeing, but the next day was Sunday, our one day without any Darija
class. I spent that particular Sunday
with my host family calling at a host uncle’s house. As always, the couscous was delicious. I tried to master the trick that the older
Moroccans do where they roll the couscous into a ball in their hand and then
flick it into their mouths. I failed
terribly, but it might just be a generational thing. None of my host siblings or cousins eat it
that way and I wasn’t alone with my spoon.
This host uncle lives in a different area from my family, right in the
very outskirts of Fes, and his was the first neighborhood where it really
struck me that I’m living in the cultural Middle East. Maybe it was the preponderance of horse drawn
transportation (or the cool half motorcycle, half pickup truck combos that
street venders use), maybe it was the strange lack of grass in his neighborhood
compared to the surrounding countryside and inner neighborhoods, maybe it was
just that time, but last Sunday was the moment when I really realized where I
was and how differently I’m living. It
was a great moment, and an important step in integration I think, though
daunting at the same time!
The following week was exhausting
on two fronts. The Peace Corps has
decided that it wants more time spent in training doing the kind of work we do
in site, so for the first time ever trainees helped out at the annual spring
break camps that happen at each of the Dar Chebabs. Of course they sent a current PCV to help,
and there was our LCF (frequent readers may remember Language and Cultural
Facilitator) and a small but energetic Moroccan staff, but this was still our
first step into a larger world. In the
mornings we taught English lessons and helped the Moroccan staff lead camp activities,
in the afternoon the staff and the PCV worked with the kids while we worked on
language, our second front. This was, of
course, the week where we really started to lay into verbs and the weird
conjugation patterns of Darija. We went
from knowing how to use just three or four verbs to being able to use about 80
verbs in all four different conjugations of the simple past in about three
days. It’s huge, I can communicate much
more fully with my family. In the past tense. The much more complicated present tense is
this week’s challenge. Baby leaps.
Working with the kids was a lot of
fun. The camp was not particularly
large, maybe about 15 kids, but we were still able to divide them into two English
classes (beginner and intermediate/advanced) so that each of the trainees who
wanted to would have a chance to run a class.
The PCV noticed that although the higher level class wanted to speak and
write in the past tense not all of them had a grasp of when and how to do use
different tenses in the past so I gave a lesson on the simple past tense. Grammar lectures are hard to make fun and
exciting, but now I know a few things that work to make class more interesting,
along with a bunch that don’t. In the
second half of the class I had the kids play a game that involved correctly
conjugating verbs in the past. They actually seemed to really enjoy it, even
though the girls (who were much more advanced) had an extremely lopsided
victory. I don’t know if the more
advanced students learned anything new, but I think the less advanced students
learned something. If nothing else the
kid who pronounced “walked” as “walk Ed” can say it correctly now, so I call that
a success.
Camp games are the same the world
over, though of course “steal the bacon” has another name here, even in
translation. Never quite caught what
that name was. It was interesting to see
where the language barrier caused a problem and where it didn’t. One day we led a short basketball skills
tutorial and I was able to show my students how to dribble, pass, and shoot all
with decent technique even with my limited Darija, but no matter how hard we
tried we couldn’t explain to them how the game “knockout” worked. I would have thought explaining the rules to
simple games would be easier than transferring technique, but I guess not.
While on the topic of simple games,
this is as good a time as any to describe the Moroccan version of checkers that
my host brother taught me last week. It
is similar to what we play in the States, with three major changes to the
rules. First, you can play with either 8
or 12 pieces to a side (the American version is always 12). If you have just eight pieces the strategy
changes dramatically. Second, if you
have the opportunity you must make a jump.
I know some people play like that in the States, but there’s a Moroccan
twist, if you miss the fact that you have a jump or decide not to take it
because you would set up the opponent’s double jump you lose the piece that
could have made the jump. Third, and
most important, kings can move as far as they want in a straight line, like
bishops in chess, and can only be stopped by two pieces in a row. If they take a piece they can keep going as
far as they want/can, and if there is an opportunity to take another piece in a
different line after they’ve taken the first they can turn down that line. At first I didn’t like the outsized power
this gave the kings, but learning how to contain and catch them has been a lot
of fun. Now that I’ve gotten the hang of
it I can usually beat my host brother, who is just 16, but his uncle is a force
to be reckoned with and I can usually only just trade wins with him.
After our long week of
teaching/learning grammar and playing games (read that sarcastically if you
want, it really was exhausting) some of the other trainees and I took a break
by going to the nearby town of Moulay Yacoub and taking a hike. Moulay Yacoub was built on top of a hot
spring and boasts two hammams that use the hot spring to fill pools like Roman
baths. Our plan was to hike in the hills
around the town and then visit one of these hammams. The hike was fantastic. The weather was touch and go all day, and the
recent rain made the trail so muddy that we had to kick the mud off our shoes
every few steps to be able to move at all.
I say trail, but it was really more of a sheep path, which just made it
all the trickier to navigate. The
beautiful, deep green, rolling hills around the town more than made up for
these setbacks. We had a picnic lunch on
a vista over the town, which was a multicolored flash in the middle of the
solidly green terrain. Pine trees grew
next to cactus grew next to grain in the fields that surrounded us. At the top of the next hill I pulled out my
ocarina; the wind was so strong that if I held the little instrument at the
right angle the wind played it for me.
Unfortunately I have no photos since the combination of hail when we set
out and the plan to visit a hammam made me leave my camera at home. I don’t really regret it. No photo I could have taken with my camera
would have done the view justice, and with all the slipping in the mud it might
have gotten damaged. It was a great day
off and I’ve been able to throw myself into my classes this week with all the
more energy because of it.
So there you go, honey and bee
stings. The Peace Corps training
experience. The honey is so sweet it’s
easy to tolerate the stings. I’ll close
with one last bit of honey for you and me.
Hopefully it will help you tolerate the bee sting of this unfortunately,
yet necessarily, rambling post. I
mentioned to my LCF that I’m interested in Joha stories. He loves Joha stories. He told my one, so here it is, my first Joha
story told to me by a Moroccan!
Joha had a garden, and everyday he
would go out to his garden and ask God to give him one hundred gold coins. Everyday his neighbor heard him calling to
God, so one day, as a joke, he threw a bag full of gold coins over their shared
wall. Joha picked it up and thanked God
for his good fortune. Later, the
neighbor went to Joha’s to explain the joke and get his money back. He knocked on the door. Joha threw it open, greeted his neighbor, and
told that God had answered his prayers and given him a bag full of gold. The neighbor told him what actually
happened. Joha said he did not believe
him and they argued. Eventually the
neighbor said they should take their arguments before a judge. Joha said, “I can’t got to see a judge, I
don’t have a donkey to take me to one.”
The neighbor said that he would lend Joha a donkey. Joha said, “I can’t go to see a judge, my djellaba has a tear in it.” The neighbor said that he would lend Joha a djellaba. They set out to see the judge, Joha riding
the neighbor’s donkey and wearing his djellaba.
When they reached the judge the
neighbor explained what had happened.
Then the judge asked Joha for his side of the story. Joha said, “This man is crazy, ask him about
anything of mine and he’ll say it is his.”
The judge asked the neighbor if the
djellaba was Joha’s. The neighbor said, “No, its mine!” The judge asked the neighbor if the donkey
was Joha’s. The neighbor said, “No,
that’s mine too!” The judge ruled in
Joha’s favor.
P.S. Next post’s honey will include
a recipe for shareia from my host
sister, I just want to double check the English translation of a couple of the
ingredients.
P.P.S. I just had my first genuine
Moroccan harisa at lunch with my host
family. For those of you who don’t know,
harisa is a spicy North African
condiment. I’m going to have to eat a
lot of it these next two years, because I don’t think I can go back to the
American versions I’ve had after this!
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