A friend of
mine here who on occasion practices his English by reading my blog suggested
the other day that I should stop searching for Joha because I’ve already found
him, and been hiding the secret for months at that. He argues, not unreasonably, that the owner
of our favorite café is probably the most Joha like character I’m likely to
meet in the course of my service. While
I’m not totally convinced, I think I’ll share a few stories about this
potential Joha (who I’ll call Nasuredin for convenience) and let you all
decide.
Nasuredin
is a skinny man of average height. He
sports a tightly packed helmet of curls, and at all times walks around with a
trickster’s gleam in his eyes. Very few
things he says aren’t puns of some sort, usually requiring the listener to
quickly move from Darija to Tamazight to Standard Arabic to colloquial Egyptian
Arabic and back—this, unfortunately, will spoil some of the jokes. He’s very glad I’m just starting Tamazight
since my Darija is getting good enough that he can’t fool me quite as easily in
it. Now he’s got a whole new language to
mislead me in.
Some pieces
of Nasuredin’s wisdom:
A friend and I walk into the café
eating a traditional snack of fried potato balls (makuda). “You two must be
very complicated (ma’koda in Standard
Arabic) men. You always bring
complications into my café.”
“You know, if I hit you with this
broom stick you could never have children.”
“Why would you do that?”
“To test a superstition.”
“A beautiful (gmila in colloquial Egyptian Arabic) Moroccan girl went to visit
Cairo. She wondered why everyone kept
calling her stew (gmila in Darija).”
One day while we were sitting
outside he came out of a door I thought was to the next house over carrying our
tea and announced, “A mouse needs many holes.”
On another day I asked for some tea
(dqa atay, in slang Darija). When he brought it out he apologized to my
friends, but said he had to give one of them a beating with the tea (dka atay).
While sweeping up he asked if we
should pack up some of the dust and send it to the last volunteer, “since he
probably misses it by now.”
“What are you two doing here so
early? You’re always my last customers. If you keep coming this early you’ll put me
out of business!”
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