Sunday, October 23, 2005

Field trip to Imilchil


Greetings from (my brief moment in) civilization! I returned from the Berber village of Imilchil on Thursday. Located farther south in the Atlas Mountains, Imilchil is fours hour transit from the nearest town of note – a stunning drive (particularly by sunrise, as I enjoyed during my return trip) on a crowded van through arid valleys. Although it is an extremely small town, with no electricity (there used to be a generator, but it broke some time ago) and running water only for two hours each morning (lots of fun filling bottles!), it actually has more traces of civilization than my homestay site in Ait Hamza – including several small hotels and a souk (market) on Fridays and Saturdays. This is because Imilchil is a bit of a tourist draw, due both to its mountain location and its annual marriage festival.

Legend has it that long ago, a young man and a young woman from two warring Berber tribes fell in love, but their families would not let them be together (a little Shakespeare, anyone?). Because they could not be married, each wept so hard that two separate lakes were formed from their tears – Lake Isli and Lake Tislit, the latter of which I visited during my stay. Each year in commemoration, near the end of summer, there is a large festival where, traditionally, various tribes come together for women and men to choose their spouses. More recently, of course, this festival has become more of a tourist attraction, with engagements being established, but also enjoying a range of cultural events, including a craft fair.

The primary local craft is weaving in the traditional tribal pattern of Ait Haddidou – simple colored stripes in black, white, and a deep red. The women of the village have recently formed a weaving cooperative with the help of a local Peace Corps volunteer, although they continue to work only out of their homes at this stage of their organization. I met with a couple of women in the cooperative while I was there, and viewed a range of products from traditional winter capes for men and women, to more experimental efforts at designing purses.

While in Imilchil, we were invited to lfdur – the 6pm breaking of the Ramadan fast – at a couple of homes. This is always an elaborate spread, taken as soon as the dusk call to prayer is heard, consisting primarily of dates, various sweets, breads, soup, and either tea or coffee. It’s a dangerous thing for those of us who work hard to stifle our sweet tooths, as it includes local specialties such as a fried honey pastry called shebbakiya – one of those things that is simultaneously disgusting and addictive. I can feel my teeth rotting!

We also hosted a group of teachers for lfdur one evening (cooking by candlelight and unpredictable gas ovens is quite a skill in itself, I am learning!). The teachers here are assigned by the government, not surprisingly according to seniority, so that many of the youngest – however cosmopolitan their backgrounds – end up in rural areas. Interestingly, none of the teachers we met spoke any Tamazight, yet that was the only language of many of the students they taught! It made me think of the bilingual education debate at home, although here the situation is faced not by immigrants, but by local children. Also, because the country uses a standardized curriculum, these children who have lived their whole lives in a remote mountain village with no electricity are often reading books with foreign references to things like beaches or the Internet! All the same, I was amazed by the level of education of some of the young people I met, and it made me wonder at the disconnect it must create – particularly in villages, unlike Imilchil, where there is no exposure to foreigners and tourists.

My own language skills continue to be a mess! Two weeks in Azrou – where the fasting for Ramadan had become my excuse to nap at any given opportunity – had rendered me a bit lazy on the studying front. When I got to Imilchil, of course the dialect, and some of the vocabulary, varies a bit both from the dialect spoken by my trainer and from the one my host family in Ait Hamza speaks. The upshot is that now I know that no matter how much progress I make in the next month, I’ll still have to relearn everything when I get to my final site! I pick up bits and pieces of what’s said to me, but still feel like I have no capacity to respond (not to mention my pronunciation is still all over the place!). I know it will come – I am amazed to hear other volunteers who have only been here a year – but for now I think that remains a source of anxiety for myself and for many of my other fellow trainees!

Generally, all is well, and I am preparing myself for the likelihood of a rather rural placement, given my recent assignments, but I’ll find out about that in about two weeks! While the amenities may be lacking, I think there is a bit more security in a rural site, although the attention is simply different (from people yelling out your name – everyone here calls me Najia, the name given to me by my host family – to little girls wanting kisses or tearing hairpins out of my hair, to little boys who alternatively test their Western language skills on you or simply throw rocks…). I’m also getting more used to navigating the Turkish toilets and infrequent bathing, although at least there seems to be a hamman (public bath) most everywhere! Things have been a fun so far, but I really am feeling ready to get settled somewhere (hopefully a little warmer than Imilchil!) not too long from now…

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Ait Hamza


Mbruk Ramadan!

I have recently returned from my first week of community based training in the village of Ait Hamza, which was quite a change from our training activities in Azrou. Ait Hamza is located less than an hour away from Azrou, but it is an entirely different universe, as we quickly discovered after checking in with the Caid and gendarmes at the slightly larger nearby town of Guigou.

In many ways, Ait Hamza remains quite primitive – its population is approximately 2,000, although I’d have guessed about half of that… Apart from the weaving cooperative with whom our group is working, the town’s primary source of income is agriculture – wheat, barley, lentils, onions, or potatoes, depending upon the season. The women in particular lead hard lives, working in the fields, taking care of their families, and weaving (many of the village men are military or retired military; if they work locally at all, it is in one of the village’s few shops). The cooperative has a membership of about 75 women, 3-4 of whom are literate. They are currently working in a building that is not large enough to accommodate the entire group, so many only work from home.

Throughout the week, I was able to observe the women working at the looms and performing the difficult process of beating and washing out wool in the river. We also spent a bit of time speaking with them and learning about their work. There were many fine meals and snacks, and exposure to local culture which included hearing some traditional Berber musicians perform at the house of one local family following a henna party and dinner (which was hard to eat – done by hand from shared dishes – with all of that stuff on my hands!). Some members of the community are better educated, and these were often my window to understanding what was going on around me, although in most cases I knew that, as the American, I was the main event during social visits, when accompanying my family to the local tahanut, or simply walking down the street.

I am staying with a family that is small by any standard, especially Moroccan – with mma Itto, baba (Mohamed), and their 14-year old daughter Fatima, who goes by Mouna. Their house is modest, with only 3 rooms, and I felt a little uncomfortable that I was given their salon – by far the nicest room in the house – to stay in. While they do have basic infrastructure – electricity and running water – managing simple daily activities such as washing in the one sink in the house (in the kitchen area), or using the WC (or bit lma – a Turkish toilet located in a barely private walled off area) took a bit of strategic planning! As for Ait Hamza in general, there’s not a trash can to be found (that I know of), and my fellow trainees and I decided simply to burn our rubbish a couple of times during the week! Bathing involved an elaborate affair (only once) of setting up a hammam in the bit lma using tarps and buckets of hot and cold water…

Mma Itto is a weaver by trade, currently vice-president of the local cooperative. She keeps one loom at home where she is currently working on a vibrant piece incorporating the Tamazight alphabet (which to me looks almost hieroglyphic, and not at all like the Arabic script), and she also works over in the cooperative at various times during the day. Like many of the older women in the community, she maintains a more traditional Berber identity, speaking only the local dialect, and sporting tribal tattoos on her face. The day we met, I believe she was genuinely shocked that I really did not speak her language at all (those few words of Tamazight greetings I learned beforehand didn’t go too far, especially with my accent!). So we took a long walk which consisted of my asking the names of various natural and agricultural products. Mercifully, baba and Mouna speak a little French, so we were able to bridge any critical communication gaps by fumbling through that, and of course Itto seemed ready to grant unconditional love to her new daughter in spite of the fact that our conversations – especially during the beginning of the week – consisted of little more than my attempting to repeat everything she said to me until she was convinced I truly had no idea what she was saying! Thankfully, by the end of the week, I’d picked up enough basic phrases and grammar to get some sense of things contextually, and of course our intense language study has continued now that we are back in Azrou.

Itto, baba, and Mouna are a unique family. Baba is actually the security guard at the women’s cooperative, but when he is at home, he helps out with minor household tasks far more than I would have expected, and indeed far more than I have observed of men in other homes. My family also keeps a pet cat which, contrary to what I had read about the relationships between Moroccans and their pets, they – especially baba – treat like another member of the family. (The downside is that the cat loved getting into my bedding and clothes, so I am not exactly sure what sort of infestation I have brought back to Azrou with me, although that does not seem to be an uncommon affliction among my fellow trainees!).

In many ways, I feel like I might as well be sitting in a home in middle America, with only the environment itself being different. We sit around a table, on the floor, in the cramped family area, where there is a TV and where Itto keeps her loom. During our evening “snack” and dinner, we watch TV, including Egyptian soap operas, local news in Arabic and French, what looks like an Arabic version of the “People’s Court,” and a French-dubbed “Married With Children” (with a startling break in the middle while the evening call to prayer is broadcast). Manu comes and goes with her friends, getting help from them and baba with her homework. I’ve tried to convince her that my French isn’t so good that she should be asking for my help with that, but she is also just starting to learn English, so I’ve given her a little help with that, in exchange for her fairly intense efforts to improve my Tamazight pronunciation. She is quite happy to get in my face and yell until I get it right, which actually does help!

Ait Hamza is so small that it’s hardly a 10 minute walk between the most distant buildings in the village, but I did try to get in a little exercise there, much to the amusement of my family and myself. One evening Itto walked into the salon to find me using some exercise bands. Lacking the facility to explain what I was doing, I did a couple of simple curls with my band and then handed it to Itto, who began pulling and curling until, suddenly, she threw her arms into the air and dropped into a split! Then she went out into the family room and apparently told baba what I was doing. When I came out, he told me he has also practiced some yoga, demonstrated a nice standing forward bend, and then also dropped down into a side split! Needless to say I hoped I’d found some new way of communicating, and invited Itto to join me for some yoga again the following night. Unfortunately, we didn’t get too far, as she began giggling uncontrollably about two steps into our sun salutations! At least now I know that when I need a little alone time, I can point at my room and say “yoga,” and I think the family understands…

In spite of my efforts, this is generally not an active lifestyle, apart from the women who endure more difficult labor in the fields, cleaning wool, etc. In fact, there is a lot of sitting around, socializing, and eating. The first night, I wasn’t sure if the 6pm meal of eggs, bread, cake, tea, and zmmita (a delicious crumbly paste of flour, nuts, and spices) was a light Moroccan dinner, until I was lead to someone else’s house to be fed a rather large dinner of tajine and couscous around 11pm (the women are often fed last). That in fact turned out to be one of my lighter eating days – most of the time the evening snack consisted of far more sweets, and usually was taken at multiple houses as visits were paid (I actually experienced some nasty caffeine and sugar withdrawal headaches upon my return to Azrou). All meals become a challenge of finding the right way of convincing your host that you really can’t eat anymore – using a succession of phrases ranging from more mundane statements that you are full to thanking Allah for his blessings as an indication that, as good as the food may be, you’ve had enough. Unfortunately, it appears that I haven’t yet learned to say those with sufficient authority, although I think some of my colleagues had even more problems with being overfed than I did!

The contrast between that and being back in Azrou, where my food intake is not so closely monitored, is even more overwhelming as Ramadan began on Wednesday of this week. I decided to see if I could fast for the month, in an effort to better appreciate and respect the local culture, as well as simply to enjoy more fully the evening lftur, or breaking of the fast (talk about lots of sweets!). The first day or so was not so easy, but even here at the Aubèrge there are other trainees giving it a try, and of course the staff has altered the meal schedule accordingly. So especially during those 4am eating sessions, it does feel like there is some support from the group. After the first day, it hasn’t been as hard as I expected (in the end, we still eat plenty – it’s just that the schedule is backwards), although I am well aware that a month is a long time, so hopefully I can see it through! Frankly, one of the hardest things was simply the anticipation the night or two before. While I knew that the holiday is based on the lunar calendar, thereby causing the dates to shift every year, I hadn’t realized that we wouldn’t know in advance exactly which day the holiday starts until someone in the Moroccan desert sees the new moon and notifies the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. As such, I had a day or so where I wasn’t sure exactly when I was going to have to stop eating. But of course the announcement was made the night before, and that first morning we were woken up to eat at about 3:30am by a trumpeter on the street. We have until the call to prayer between roughly 4:30 and 5am to eat one last time. It works fine at the Aubèrge, where we’re fed another dinner around 10-11pm, but it will be interesting when we return to our homestays later in the month. Some Moroccan families stay up the night eating and celebrating until the morning call to prayer – how exhausting! (Of course people here tend to take a lot more time resting during the day during Ramadan, but I still have language classes, etc. to synthesize, which is hard enough when you’re not loopy from hunger!)

All in all, I am looking forward to my return trip to Ait Hamza later in the month, when I can celebrate Ramadan with my family and have a little more to say to them in their own language, in sh’allah. But for now I have a few more days to enjoy the comforts of Azrou (they even have Peanut M&Ms here!!!) before I leave to spend a week with a volunteer in the even smaller and more remote village of Imilchil…